gang called Anonymous for attacks on an Iranian government website as well as other government and corporate sites.
The three men, all in their 30s, are suspected leaders of the Spanish branch of Anonymous, a so-called “hacktivist” band that attacks websites in pursuit of a sometimes vague political agenda.
Earlier this month Anonymous attacked the website of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, stealing and publishing 10,365 emails involving applications from foreigners for visas to visit Iran. (See last week’s issue of the Iran Times, page seven.)
One anonymous member of Anonymous said the goal was to damage Iran’s image.
The arrests in Spain follow similar actions against Anonymous in the US and UK in December and January.
As part of Spain’s probe of the group, authorities had to overcome “complicated security measures taken by its members to protect its anonymity,” according to the police statement.
Spanish police said the server they seized in one of their raids had been used to attack websites of the governments of Iran, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Chile, Columbia and New Zealand, two Spanish banks, the Italian utility Enel, and the two major political parties of Spain the night before elections last month, among other sites.
Anonymous, composed of hundreds of hackers and activists in several countries, gained attention in December when it targeted EBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, Visa and other companies deemed hostile to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that published leaked US diplomatic communications on its website.
The arrests will have “little overall impact” in slowing the group’s activities because many accused hackers are minors and are widely dispersed geographically, John D’Arcy, an assistant professor of information-technology management at the University of Notre Dame, told the Bloomberg news service.
Barrett Brown, an unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, said the three people arrested in Spain were not part of the core leadership or among the members of the group who are skilled at hacking networks. “They weren’t anybody major,” he said.
“They captured a couple of regional people who were involved in Anonymous and got a server,” Brown said, referring to a computer used in cyber attacks against government websites that the Spanish policed seized in one of the suspects’ homes. “It’s not a server anyone is going to miss,” he insisted.
A federal grand jury in San Jose, California, in February considered evidence collected by the FBI about Anonymous, including computers and mobile phones seized from suspected leaders as prosecutors probe the attacks.
London police in January arrested five males, including three teenagers, as part of a probe of corporate cyber attacks related to WikiLeaks.