According to a Thursday announcement by the US Attorney's office, 25-year-old Moscow resident Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha, suspected to be the mastermind behind two botnet-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Amazon. com, has been arrested in Cyprus. Detained on an international warrant on Wednesday, Zubakha now awaits a possible extradition to the US.

Going by an indictment unsealed by the US Attorney Jenny Durkan in district court in western Washington on Thursday, the Russian man was indicted in May 2011 for spearheading the botnet attacks against the online retailer Amazon on June 6 and June 9, 2008, causing the disruption of the Amazon site.

As per the prosecutors, the first DDoS against Amazon was launched by Zubakha - who uses hacker names like 'Eraflame', 'Dima-k17' and 'DDService' - at 10.23am PST on 6 June, 2008, along with his co-conspirator, Sergey Viktorovich Logashov. That attack was mitigated by Amazon at 2.55pm the same day.

However, at 10.06am on June 9, 2008, Zubakha launched the second attack, which was more prolonged than the first one; and continued for four days before Amazon was finally able to rectify the situation on 12 June.

With Zubakha also charged with possessing credit card track data for over 28,000 Boeing Employees Credit Union (BECU) accounts, prosecutors are seeking his extradition from Cyprus to the US so that he can stand trial on the charges, which can lead to a potential $250,000 (£160,000) in fine, and up to 10 years in prison.