Computer hackers arrested in Spain
Spanish police have arrested five young computer hackers who allegedly disabled internet pages run by government agencies in the US, Latin America and Asia.
The National Police described the suspects as belonging to one of the most active hacker groups on the internet and said two of the suspects were only 16 years old. The others are 19 or 20.
On the internet, the group calls itself D.O.M Team, police said.
One of the group's techniques was to infiltrate websites and insert a page of its own, police said. A Google search turns up several hits with pages that fit this description.
The group attacked some 21,000 web pages over the last two years, police said in a statement.
The five were arrested this week in Barcelona, Burgos, Malaga and Valencia.
The statement did not identify which government websites the suspects are accused of tampering with.
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported in March that the group had infiltrated Nasa's web page, but a police official said she could not confirm this.
The group also hacked the Venezuelan national telephone company's page, and that of the Spanish telephone operator Jazztel, among others, the paper said.
El Mundo said it had contacted the group and it described itself not as a bunch of delinquents., but computer-lovers that raid websites to show system administrators the pages' vulnerabilities
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