Three people have been arrested in Spain for allegedly belonging to a loose-knit international activist group that targeted governments including New Zealand's.
A statement from Spanish police yesterday identified the three detainees as leaders of the Spanish section of a group that calls itself "Anonymous".
Police said a computer server in one of their homes was used to co-ordinate and carry out the cyber attacks on targets including two major Spanish banks, the Italian energy company Enel and the governments of New Zealand, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile and Colombia.
A parliamentary website suffered intermittent outages in April after the Anonymous group threatened the New Zealand Government over its passing of the controversial Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, which aims to stop illegal file sharing by internet users.
A press release on the Anonymous website had earlier claimed New Zealand had "crossed the line" in passing the bill, and said attacks would follow.
After the outages, Parliamentary Service general manager Geoff Thorn sent an email to MPs which said the problems were due to the parliamentary website being overloaded.
The email said: "It is possible that this traffic is related to a public threat to bring down the parliamentary website.
- Nicholas Jones and AP
Three held over hacking of government websites
Photo / Getty Images
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