Mariposa botnet creators busted

Spanish police today announced they have arrested three men suspected of orchestrating an attack which created a network of 13 million computers known as Mariposa. Officials said the botnet was large enough to have brought down an entire country’s online infrastructure.

According to Juan Salon, head of Spain’s cybercrime department, the network was larger than the one used to cripple most major Estonian Web sites in 2007. Yet the three suspects are said to have little knowledge of sophisticated hacking and are believed to have bought a program which they used to carry out the attacks.

The trio, who have only been identified by their online handles netkairo, johnyloleante, and ostiator, are accused of illegally gathering 800,000 pieces of confidential data from victim’s machines. They are said to have made money from their activity both by using credit card details to steak money and by hiring out access to the botnet to other hackers.

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