Mariposa dismantled, a network of 13 million PCs pirated from Spain

13 million machines controlled and hired out, without the knowledge of their owners, by three young Spaniards aged 25 to 31! 190 countries affected, as well as 40 banks and numerous other top ranking companies, both public and private! Stranger still, those behind the hack weren't even IT boffins.

They were also holding and profiting from the personal details of 800,000 victims. The three people behind the operation were arrested by the Spanish authorities in several stages. Their network, known as Mariposa (butterfly in Spanish), was first discovered in May 2009 by the Canadian company Defence Intelligence before being dismantled in an internationally co-ordinated operation involving, among others, the FBI. The arrests were made in February following a surprising error by Netkairo, aka hamlet17, the 31-year old leader who connected to the botnet without masking his identity first.

A fourth member of the group, possibly Venezuelan, is also reported to be involved.
This is the largest network of its type ever dismantled. There are reported to be between 4000 and 6000 currently in existence.

We should say that at the press conference on the incident the police revealed that the tool used to hack into and control the vast network was not created by the hackers but purchased. The Guardia Civil says that the group was not necessarily aware of what it was controlling and that the worst had been avoided. "In view of the number of computers affected, an enormous cyberterrorist attack could have been organised" a police communiqué stated. It also mentioned the modest lives lived by these "small time criminals.

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