Three people suspected of being involved in attacks against websites belonging to Sony, Spanish banks BBVA and Bankia, Italian energy company Enel, and the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Colombia, and New Zealand have been arrested in Spain. All three were claimed to be the leadership of hacktivist organization Anonymous in Spain.
The individuals are accused of performing and organizing large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that took their victims’ Web servers offline. The detainees were also claimed to have attacked the websites of Spain’s Central Electoral Board on May 18, and later the sites of the Catalan police and the UGT trade union.
The arrests were made after investigation work by the Brigada de Investigación Tecnológica (BIT), the cybercrime division of Spain’s civilian police force. With these arrests, Spain joins the UK, US, and Netherlands in having taken police action against Anonymous members. During the investigation, more than 2,000,000 lines of IRC logs were examined to track down the people involved.
The three were arrested in Almeria, Barcelona, and Valencia. One of those arrested was said to have set up an IRC server in their home, and this server was used by all three to coordinate their various hack attacks. Those attacks were DDoS attacks, performed using Anonymous’ preferred LOIC tool; LOIC has an automatic mode that uses IRC for command and control. Also found were malware creation tools and WiFi cracking software; two of the people arrested apparently had no Internet connection themselves, instead depending on the WiFi connections of others.
Though Sony was one of the organizations victimized by the hacktivists, the official statement issued by the police did not indicate any suspicion of involvement in the hacks that forced Sony to take Playstation Network offline for weeks, nor the subsequent hacks made on Sony Web properties by LulzSec. Rather, the three hackers appear to have been involved with the denial of service attacks of early April. Vocal Anonymous faction AnonOps has long denied that Anonymous had any involvement with the broader, more serious attack against Playstation Network.
When news of the arrests became public, AnonOps was swift to issue a warning to the Spanish authorities: Expect us.
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