Anonymous Sony Hackers Arrested In Spain

The Spanish National Police have allegedly arrested three hackers in connection with the cyber attack on Sony's PlayStation Network.

According to a report in The New York Times, the Spanish police have arrested three leaders of the hacking collective Anonymous, which was allegedly responsible for the Sony hacking ordeal. In early April, hackers infiltrated Sony's PlayStation Network server and illegally accessed millions of private consumer data. The hack caused Sony to shutdown their network for nearly a month while it worked to restore it with greater security.

The police said they found a computer server in one of the hacker's homes. The server was responsible for helping launch attacks against a number of government and corporate websites, which included Sony.

One of the arrested hackers, a 31-year old male, was detained in Almería, Spain last May after a separate attack against the country's Central Electoral Board. The other two hackers, detained in Barcelona and Valencia, were around the same age and were arrested after attacks to the Catalan Police. The hackers will be charged with illegal association to attack public and corporate Web sites, which is a crime punishable of up to three years in prison.

The hackers have been targeted by the Spanish government for the past eight months. Last year, hackers infiltrated the Spanish Ministry of Culture web site to protest Spanish legislation increasing punishments for illegal downloads of music and other content. The Spanish police said they filed through millions of lines of chat logs to identify who was coordinating the group's activities.

Anonymous has been at the forefront of an increasing amount of high-profile attacks on governments and major organizations. Their body of work includes hacking and helping start-up the Egyptian government overthrow, hacking MasterCard, PayPal and Visa after they stopped payments to Wikileaks and the attacks on Sony.

Other arrests have been made across the world of alleged Anonymous members in the U.K. and Holland.

Follow Gabriel Perna on Twitter at @GabrielSPerna