Spain smashes massive rogue PC network

MADRID: Spanish police said on Wednesday that they have collaborated with the FBI to smash the world's biggest network of virus-infected computers, which hijacked over 13 million PCs, stealing credit card details and other data, and arrested three people who ran the operation.

The men were suspected of running the Mariposa botnet, named after the Spanish word for butterfly, Spain's Civil Guard said on Tuesday.

Mariposa had infected machines in 190 countries in homes, government agencies, schools, over half of the world's 1,000 largest companies and at least 40 big financial institutions. "It was so nasty, we thought 'We have to turn this off. We have to cut off the head,'" said Chris Davis, CEO of Defense Intelligence Inc, which discovered the virus last year.

Mariposa was programmed to secretly take control of infected PCs, recruiting them as "slaves" in an army known as a "botnet."

It would steal login credentials and record every key stroke on an infected computer and send the data to a "command and control center," where the ringleaders stored it.

Police found personal data from over 800,000 computer users on the PC belonging the suspected ringleader of the operation. Police believe he earned a living by renting out the infected computer networks to third parties who used them for criminal purposes. AFP