Police in Spain said they dealt a blow to a shadowy group of computer hackers that directed Internet attacks against governments, banks and multinational companies

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The Spanish national police Friday said they recently arrested three members of the group, called Anonymous, and raided a house where they seized a computer server allegedly used by the individuals to coordinate and launch cyberattacks.

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 the 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.


"Anonymous will continue, we have simply dismantled the cupola of Anonymous in Spain," Manuel Vazquez, chief of the Spanish police's high-tech crime unit, said at a press conference Friday.


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.

A server used by one of the individuals, a 31-year-old who lives in Gijon but was detained in Almeria, was seized last month, police said. Spain's cyber crime police scrolled through millions of lines of online chat room logs, which provided information that helped lead to the arrests.

Authorities said they found software designed specifically to infect other people's computers and evidence of sophisticated encryption and other techniques for hiding an individual's identity. Two of the individuals didn't even have Internet access in their homes, investigators said but instead accessed the Web by using Wi-Fi signals from their neighbors.

The arrests were related to so-called denial-of-service attacks on Sony websites and other sites, and not to the recent high-profile theft of personal data of Sony customers, Mr. Vazquez of the Spanish police said. There wasn't evidence the three individuals arrested were involved in data theft, he added.

Denial of service attacks cause havoc by bombarding websites with data with the aim of knocking them offline. Members of Anonymous have said they launched such attacks against Sony websites in recent months in retaliation for a lawsuit Sony filed against a programmer who wrote software allowing gamers to reconfigure PlayStation 3 consoles.

Separately, Sony in April was forced to suspend its PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment services after hackers compromised more than 100 million user accounts and stole customer data, including names, addresses and birthdates. Other Sony sites and services have been targeted in the weeks following the April attack. Anonymous has denied it co-ordinated those attacks.

Anonymous entered the spotlight late last year with a number of cyber attacks on companies and individuals that they said tried to impede the work of document-sharing website WikiLeaks. That included MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc., which had halted payments to WikiLeaks. They've moved on in recent months to attack websites linked to Middle Eastern governments.


There already have been several Anonymous-related arrests in Europe on suspicion of computer-related crimes. Dutch police arrested two teenage males in December; both are awaiting trial. And U.K. police in January arrested five males aged 15 years to 26 years, who currently are on bail and haven't been charged.

In the U.S., Federal Bureau of Investigation agents conducted more than 40 searches of the homes of alleged Anonymous members across the country in January. No arrests have been made following those searches.

But Anonymous is well-known to U.S. law enforcement. In recent years, U.S. authorities have successfully prosecuted at least two individuals that participated in attacks by the group on the Church of Scientology.

Spain's investigation began in October following a complaint from the culture ministry, which had seen its website targeted by online attacks in retaliation for a law aimed at preventing the illegal download of copyright music or other content.

Separate attacks against Spain's Central Electoral Board in May led to the arrest of the individual in Almeria. Further attacks against other targets, including the Catalan police, led to the two other arrests, in Barcelona and Alicante.


According to Spanish police and other computer specialists, members of Anonymous use a piece of software called LOIC, or low orbit ion canon, to launch their denial-of-service attacks. Easily downloadable from the Internet, it allows attackers to send large volumes of data over the network to the server computer hosting the website in the hopes of taking it offline or at least slowing it down.

Members of Anonymous, police said, also enlist the help of armies of infected computers—known as botnets—which can involve thousands of far-flung computers that are controlled remotely to increase the impact of attacks.

What Is Anonymous?

A loose-knit global group of people that has no single leader but conducts coordinated computer attacks
Swamps its targets with flood of Internet traffic that disrupts and disables websites
Targets have included the Church of Scientology, Sony, Visa and government agencies
Members contribute their computers for attacks; some control armies of infected PCs