Three hackers who authorities claim broke into several Sony web sites have been detained by police in Spain.The men, believed to be members of the notorious group Anonymous, were traced after police trawled through millions of lines worth of chat logs.
The arrests in the cities of Barcelona, Valencia and Almeria follow arrests in the UK and the US.
Police officers located the suspects after they gained an insight into users of the LOIC internet program, which is used to execute denial of service (DDoS) attacks on websites.
This program is used to bombard servers with data until they crash.
Police identified that the LOIC platform, which Spanish police called a “cornerstone” of the hacking community, had flaws which they were able to use to track down the offenders.
Anonymous became a household name in April when Sony accused the ‘group of connected internet citizens’ of masterminding the PlayStation Network attack.
The Spanish national police said overnight that they raided a house where they seized a computer server allegedly used by the individuals to coordinate and launch cyberattacks.
Spanish police arrested three alleged members of Anonymous, which claims responsibility for hacking attacks on Sony, MasterCard and others. WSJ’s Cassell Bryan-Low has the story.
The targets included the websites of Sony Corp., two large Spanish banks and Italian energy company Enel SpA, as well as sites belonging to the governments of Egypt, Libya and Iran and other countries, police said.
The three individuals were arrested on suspicion of causing economic damage, among other things, and have been released from police custody pending trial. Police didn’t release the suspects’ names, but said they were in their early 30s. One of the individuals is unemployed and one is a sailor.
Police officials described the individuals as senior members within Anonymous in Spain. The group is a loose-knit collective of so-called hactivists, with cells in various countries that communicate over the Internet to carry out coordinated attacks.
