Man charged over Cheshire and Greater Manchester Police cyber-attacks

Image source, PA

Image caption, The attacks relate to the Cheshire and Greater Manchester forces' websites

A man has been charged over cyber-attacks which targeted the websites of two police forces.

Liam Reece Watts, 19, of Stratford Road in Chorley, Lancashire, faces two counts of unauthorised acts with intent to impair operation of or prevent access to a computer.

The charges relate to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the Greater Manchester and Cheshire forces.

He is due to appear at Chester Magistrates' Court later.

DDoS attacks involve flooding a target's service with extremely high volumes of traffic in an effort to overwhelm them.