Aryanews- Spanish police say they arrested hackers who infected 13 million computers worldwide with a virus that stole credit card numbers and personal data.
In what experts call one of the biggest cyber crimes ever, the men are accused of running a botnet, or network of computers controlled by a virus's creators, which they named Mariposa, the Spanish word for butterfly, The Times of London reported.
The virus infected 800,000 computers in 190 countries and in more than half of the world's 1,000 largest companies, including 40 major financial institutions, two Internet security firms that helped Spanish officials said.
One of the firms, Canada's Defence Intelligence, discovered the virus in December, the Times reported.
"It was so nasty, we thought, 'We have to turn this off. We have to cut off the head,'" said Chris Davis, chief executive officer of Defence Intelligence. "Basically they were going after anything that would make them money."
Mariposa, initially spread by exploiting a weakness in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser, was designed to steal log-in details and record all key strokes on an infected computer, then send the data back to a control center where the hackers stored it, authorities said. The virus also infected USB sticks.
"Nobody has seen anything of this size before, " said Lieutenant Col. Jose Antonio Berrocal of the Spanish Civil Guard's Central Technological Unit Civil Guard, which worked on the investigation with the FBI.
The hackers, calling themselves the Nightmare Days Team, were arrested last month at their homes in Balmaseda, in the Basque Country, Santiago de Compostela and Murcia, the Times said. The three men, all identified by initials, are to appear before Spain's National Court in Madrid .