Three men responsible for bringing down the computers of powerful Fortune 1000 companies and international banks have finally been arrested in their home country of Slovenia.
The “ring leader” of the operation was 23 years old, although per Slovenian law his name will not be released at this time. Local law officials as well as the FBI confirmed the arrests and are expected to provide more details on Friday.
What is known is that these three men were charged with being linked to the Mariposa botnet hack, which was disabled a few months ago but not until after it tore havoc across the globe.
Although the hackers were very ingenious with the execution of the attack, changing code and origination of the hack on a continuous rotation, they hit a rather blunderous error in registering one of the domains that hosted the hack. One of the guys used his real name to register that domain, and although it was a private domain officials were able to obtain the information they needed.
The botnet was so destructive that a team of Internet security experts formed a group to take it down, which was finally achieved in March. Three men were arrested at that time in Spain.
The Slovenians that were arrested are not currently locked up but they will be faced with criminal charges.
