A man will appear in court next month accused of attacks on Cambridge University’s website. 

Lewys Martin, 20, of Walmer in Kent, is set to appear before magistrates in Maidstone on 20 December. Martin is also accused of launching attacks against the public websites of Oxford University and the Kent Police. It is understood that the Kent Police's Special Branch investigations team and the Kent Police Digital Forensic Unit, found evidence that Martin had launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the websites in a bid to take them offline.

Martin has been charged with 17 offences in total, including unauthorised acts with intent to impair operation of or prevent or hinder access to a computer, theft and use of personal data, failing to disclose passwords to encrypted equipment and a number of other computer misuse offences.

This is not the first time Martin has faced court over computer-related offences. He previously appeared before judges in May of this year and was sent to jail for spreading malicious software for a popular computer game. The software contained a trojan horse which harvested credit card details and other personal information, which he then sold on to others, earning thousands of pounds in the process. Police found Martin with print-outs of details for at least 300 credit cards and passwords. 

For this, and a number of counts of attempted theft of computer equipment from Kent colleges, he received an 18-month prison sentence, which he is currently serving.  A suspended sentence had already been handed to Martin when he was convicted of the offences in November of last year. 

Cambridge’s website and computer systems have been hit by a number of attacks in the last year, most recently having been targeted by supporters of Julian Assange in August and September.