Madrid, Spain (CNN) — Authorities have arrested three Spaniards suspected of infecting 13 million computers with a program that allowed them to steal personal and financial data worldwide, Spain’s Civil Guard said Wednesday.
The Civil Guards worked with the FBI and computer security firms in Canada, the United States and Spain to investigate what a Spanish official called the world’s biggest network of virus-infected computers.
The suspects “copied personal and financial data of individuals, companies and official institutions in more than 190 countries,” the Civil Guards’ statement said.
In addition to gaining illegal access to personal and financial information, the virus would have permitted those controlling the system to mount a large cyberattack from the infected computers, a U.S. official said.
Police found computer and personal information from more than 800,000 users in a search of the computers at suspects’ homes, the statement said.
The suspects, ages 31, 30 and 25, were arrested last week in Spain’s northern Vizcaya province, northwest Coruna province and southeast Murcia province, respectively. Authorities did not immediately release their identities or further details about them.
I hope they throw the book at these scumbags.
“I hope they throw the book at these scumbags”. A nice soft book, maybe made of foam rubber, and filled with cash and lucrative job offers.
Nooobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
I just had to say it…
And you are a fool if you do not request a replacement CC number every year.
Give these people jobs instead of locking them up. It’s obvious they have some intelligence, a cyber security firm or something would probably love to have them.
Now man made global hacking is something I can believe in. There’s plenty of evidence to back up the claim such hacking is really happening and there is unanimous agreement among IT professionals that such hacking is occurring.
Northern Vizcaya, that’s where I’m at and it kinda figures. I’ve met some real super geeks at the big regional net party http://euskal.org they have every year here. Last year I had the intention of upgrading one of my machines OS from XP to Ubuntu. So I left it open to attack, shared resources, no firewall, no anti-virus, and the system started to act up almost immediately. In less than 10 minutes it started to put a drag on the system. In an hour I had to reset, but apparently somebody had root-kitted my MBR ’cause after that it wouldn’t even load OS. So, I installed Ubuntu, pretty much used it as is the rest of the 4 day party – no problemo. Moral of the story, if you like M$ than you probably like getting it without lube anyways.
I think they should be fined several million dollars apiece (perhaps ten bucks for every machine they affected?) and be put in prison as long as it takes to personally hand-write a letter of apology to the owner of every one of those machines. And if they complain, put a word processor with printer where they can see it from their cell but can’t reach it.
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