Madrid (ip-192.com): Personal details relating to 800,000 were found on a computer after the Spanish police arrested three ringleaders connected to a botnet called Mariposa, the Spanish word for butterfly (ip-192.com reported here). The botnet controlling almost 13 million people did have enough power to bring down the IT-infrastructure of a whole country, said the police at a news conference in Madrid.

"This is the biggest network of zombie computers ever discovered," said Juan Salon, the head of the cybercrime unit of Spain's Civil Guard Police. "Fortunately this botnet of 13 million computers was controlled by someone who hadn't realized how powerful it was. The Mariposa botnet would have had much more computing power than the one used in a notorious "cyber-attack" on Estonia."

The three Spaniards arrested did have no criminal record and only limited hacking skills. They did buy the virus used to infiltrate on the black market over the Internet and used loopholes in Microsoft’s Internets Explorer (IE) infiltrate PC’s and servers in 190 countries. The Georgia Tech Information Security Center and Panda Security were also part of the group.

Police said that the gang tried to "rent" part of the botnet to cyber criminals from around the globe. They also sold stolen credentials such as banking and credit card information. The Mariposa network was detected in May 2009 by Defense Intelligence. The Canadian information security firm alerted the FBI.

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