The Metropolitan Police helped thwart a plot to launch a denial of service attack on the official website of this year’s royal wedding, it emerged this week.

Detective Superintendent Charile McMurdie, the Met’s cyber crime chief, revealed the episode at a conference run by defense think tank the Royal United Services Institute.

A spokesperson for the Met police later confirmed that "on 10 October a 16-year-old boy was arrested at an address in Harrogate on suspicion of an offence contrary to the Computer Misuse Act and subsequently released on bail."

"He returned on bail on 14 November and was re-bailed to return on a date in December pending further inquiries," the spokesperson said. "The alleged offence relates to a suspected attempted ‘distributed denial of service attack’ on the royal wedding website."

Denial of service attacks were made illegal in 2006 following amendments to the Computer Misuse Act 1990, passed under the Police and Justice Act 2006. The amendments followed a case in which teenager David Lennon was charged with sending five million emails to a former employer. Initially, Lennon was found not have committed any crime, although this prosection successfully appealed. 

Yesterday, ZDNet reported that the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit is to become part of the National Crime Agency. Giving evidence to a Commons select committee earlier this week, the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner Janet Williams said that the UK suffers from the absense of single authority where members public and businesses can report incidents of cyber crime.