Hacker suspects arrested in Spain

This weekend Spanish police arrested five people suspected of hacking into or completely disabling thousands of Internet pages including some run by government agencies in the U.S., Latin America and Asia. According to the Spanish authorities two of the suspects are just 16 years old. The five were arrested this week in Barcelona, Burgos, Malaga and Valencia.

Spain's National Police said the suspects belonged to the D.O.M Team, one of the most active hacker groups on the Internet. One of the group's techniques was to infiltrate Web sites and insert a page of its own, police said.

The group attacked some 21,000 Web pages over the last two years, police said in a statement which did not identify which government Web sites the suspects are accused of tampering with. In March El Mundo reported that D.O.M had infiltrated NASA's Web page aswell as the websites of the Venezuelan national telephone company and Spanish telephone operator Jazztel, but this was not confirmed by Spanish police this weekend.

The Spanish investigation began in March after the Web page of a Spanish political party, Izquierda Unida, was disabled shortly after Spain's general election March 9.
The five suspects did not know one another personally.