Spain Arrests 3 in PlayStation Cyberattacks - Spanish Police Found Hackers Through IRC Logs

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Updated thanks to GregoryRasputin at PS3Hax:

Sony has stated that they dont know who the PSN hackers are, but Spanish police seem to think it is a group of local hackers, who the claim to be the Spanish wing of the hacktivist group Anonymous, here is a quote from the source:

Note: Above image is a random pic and is not a photograph of the suspected PSN hackers.

Spain Arrests 3 in PlayStation Cyberattacks
By DAVID JOLLY and RAPHAEL MINDER

PARIS — The Spanish police said Friday that they had apprehended three men suspected of computer hacking in connection with recent cyberattacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as corporate and government Web sites around the world.

The National Police identified the three as the local leadership of the shadowy international network of computer hackers known as Anonymous, which has claimed responsibility for a wide variety of attacks.

Anonymous is made up of people from various countries organized into cells that share common goals, the police said, with activists operating anonymously but in a coordinated fashion.

One of the three “hacktivists,” a 31-year-old Spaniard, was detained in the southern city of Almería sometime after May 18, the police said. He had a computer server in his apartment in the northern port city of Gijón, from which the group attacked the Web sites of the Sony PlayStation online gaming store.

The same computer was also employed in coordinated cyberattacks against two Spanish banks, BBVA and Bankia, the Italian energy company Enel, and government sites in Spain, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Colombia and New Zealand, the police said.

The two other men, both also Spanish and in their early 30s, were picked up in Barcelona and Valencia. The statement did not make clear the timing of those detentions, but a spokeswoman for the police said all the detentions had occurred “recently.”

The spokeswoman, who did not want to be identified per department policy, said all three were subsequently released, without bail, pending formal charges.

They were expected to be charged with forming an illegal association to attack public and corporate Web sites, a charge that carries a potential sentence of up to three years in prison.

The police opened their investigation last October, after hackers overwhelmed the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Web site to protest Spanish legislation increasing punishments for illegal downloads.

It was not immediately clear how much of a role they are alleged to have played in the recent attacks on Sony. About a dozen Sony Web sites and services around the world have been hacked; the biggest breaches forced the company, which is based in Tokyo, to shut down its popular PlayStation Network for a month beginning in April.

The Japanese company has acknowledged that hackers compromised the personal data of tens of millions of user accounts. Earlier this month, a separate hacker collective called Lulz Security, or LulzSec, said it had breached a Sony Pictures site and released vital source codes.

Sony has estimated that the hacker attacks will cost it at least ¥14 billion, or $173 million, in damages, including information technology spending, legal costs, lower sales and free offers to lure back customers.

Mami Imada, a Sony spokeswoman in Tokyo, said she had no information on the arrests and declined to comment.

The police said that they had analyzed more than two million lines of chat logs since October, as well as Web pages used by the group to identify the leadership in Spain “with the capacity to make decisions and direct attacks.”

Anonymous members made use of a computer program called LOIC to crash Web sites with denial-of-service attacks, the police said.

Among recent attacks, the hackers also brought down the site of the Spanish National Electoral Commission last month before regional and municipal elections. It was that attack, on May 18, that led to the first detention in Almería.

The movement against the anti-piracy law has been closely linked to the broader youth-led political movement that have occupied Puerta del Sol in Madrid and other city squares since May 15.

These protests have called for a complete overhaul of Spain’s political system — and the laws targeting illegal downloading.

News Source: PS3Hax - Suspected Hackers Arrested In Connection With PSN Attacks

Original Source: The New York Times

Thanks to Starblaster100 for the tip!

Also, thanks to GregoryRasputin, proprietor of PS3Hax for the update on Sony's comments!

UPDATE: Spanish Police Found Hackers Through IRC Logs

Originally posted by Dukio

The arrests in Barcelona, Alicante and Almeria break the news all over the world due to the suspected relationship with the infamous Anonymous hacking crew. The group is said by the investigators to be responsible with the attacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) despite they have denied the involvement in the outage.

Although you can’t count on just one crime, the popular loosely affiliated hacking crew are deemed at fault to various high profile hacking activity in the recent years. Now back to the topic, how did the Spanish police found those suspects? After the arrests, Spanish police published, via Twitter, screenshot from IRC logs that appear to show discussion of plans to attack the Spanish electoral board as well as Spanish police websites.

The logs doesn’t prove anything substantial but we can say the attacks are a response to proposed legislation to make file sharing illegal in Spain. Whatever it is, this gonna be the start of more arrests on the Anonymous hacktivists group. Starting with this mask

Picture Source: Twitter

Update Source: tantaicbs.com

via Twitter: TantaiCBS

UPDATE: In a follow up to Spain Arrests 3 in PlayStation Cyberattacks - Spanish Police Found Hackers Through IRC Logs, here is a news update from BBC News:

Spanish police website hit by Anonymous hackers.

The website of Spain's national police force has been briefly knocked offline by hacker collective Anonymous.

The attack on the site was carried out in retaliation for the arrest of three Spanish men the police claimed were 'core' members of the group.

The hackers managed to keep Pgina Oficial del Cuerpo Nacional de Polica offline for about an hour from 2130 GMT on 12 June.

Spanish authorities would not confirm that Anonymous was behind the attack, saying only that the site was offline.

However, a statement was posted on a website linked to Anonymous, claimed responsibility for the hack, which it called #OpPolicia.

The group said it had used a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) which bombards a target website with so much data that it becomes overwhelmed.

A spokesman for the Spanish police said the cause of the outage had not yet been established.

"A website can collapse if too many people try to access it at once. I cannot confirm the link with the Anonymous group," said the spokesman.

In its statement, Anonymous said the DDoS attack was a "direct response to the Friday arrests of three individuals alleged to be associated with acts of cyber civil disobedience attributed to Anonymous."

The group said DDoS attacks were a legitimate form of peaceful protest. Some of its members are thought to have carried out similar attacks on Turkish government websites to protest against net censorship.

Anonymous also denied that the men arrested were part of the "core" of Spanish members of the group.

"They did not arrest any core group, because we don't have a core group," said Anonymous in its statement.

Source: BBC News (via) PSGroove

[Brubaker]

Do the new owners of this site consider this 'good' or 'bad' news? Apologies if this sounds cynical - but it might give the as yet 'unknown' a chance to state their position(s) and intention(s).

[tonybologna]

Maybe one of the arrested is Waninkoko. He's from Spain. Oh wait! Graf is the one still mad at Sony but he's in Germany not Spain.

[PeteNatas]

Do the new owners of this site consider this 'good' or 'bad' news? Apologies if this sounds cynical - but it might give the as yet 'unknown' a chance to state their position(s) and intention(s).

+1

[mister]

Do the new owners of this site consider this 'good' or 'bad' news? Apologies if this sounds cynical - but it might give the as yet 'unknown' a chance to state their position(s) and intention(s).

this is good news to me but I´m not the owner of this site. Stealing personal info is a crime.

but I morally support their movement against anti-piracy laws!

[Keelah Selai]

This is good news!

[fresh]

Loco...

[EnTiTy]

They really dont get the meaning, anonymous do they lol

[ebob]

this is good news to me but I´m not the owner of this site. Stealing personal info is a crime.

Thus far, Anonymous has claimed to have had nothing to do with the info stealing. Sony has stated that those "cyber criminals" were exceptionally good in covering their tracks. Honestly, it sounds like a more professional job than anonymous's ddos stuff. We'll see what evidence turns up from these arrests.

[sscultima]

What ever happened to Lulzsec leaving behind stuff on sony servers. Im sure if it was anonymous they woulda either left nothing behind or just a picture of a mask, lol.

The people who write these articles must not follow old news before they write new crap.

EDIT: as for good or bad news, i'd say both. crackers get whats coming to them no matter what their motive is