Spain Arrests Members of Anonymous Over Sony Attack

Spanish police arrested three men suspected to be members of the hacker group Anonymous on Friday, charging them with organizing cyber attacks against the websites of Sony Corp, banks and governments–but not the recent massive hacking of PlayStation gamers.

The police said the accused, arrested in Almeria, Barcelona and Alicante, were guilty of coordinated computer hacking attacks from a server set up in a house in Gijon in the north of Spain.

Spanish police alleged the three „hacktivists“ helped organize an attack that temporarily shuttered access to some Sony websites. However, they were not linked to two massive cyber attacks against Sony’s Playstation Network that resulted in the theft of information from more than 100 million customers.

Police also accused the men of launching cyber assaults on Spanish banks BBVA and Bankia, and Italian energy group Enel SpA.

[Manuel Vázquez, High-Tech Crime Unit]:
„In many cases, what we are seeing here represents true crime and a lot of damage for the attacked companies.“

Members of the loosely coordinated „Anonymous“ group, known for wearing Guy Fawkes masks made popular by the novel „V for Vendetta,“ had also hacked government sites in Egypt, Algeria, Lybia, Iran, Chile, Colombia and New Zealand, police said.

The arrests are the first in Spain against members of the „Anonymous“ group following similar legal proceedings in the United States and Britain.

Foto: NTD