Spanish police have arrested three people they say were involved in hacking Sony's Playstation Network, which recently shut down for a month as some 77 million users' information was compromised. And they say the suspects are members of Anonymous. The police announced the arrests on their official Twitter feed: "Police arrested 3 #Anonymous leaders in Barcelona, Alicante & Almería. They attacked governments of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Colombia..." The police force also said the hackers had attacked the PlayStation Store, and had "thousands of 'zombies' computers infected all over the world."

According to The New York Times, "One of the 'hacktivist' detainees, the police said, had harbored a computer server in an apartment in the northern port city of Gijon, from which the group attacked the Web sites of the Sony PlayStation online gaming store." But the report pointed out that "it was not immediately clear if the group had been the sole, or even the main, perpetrator of the recent attacks on Sony."

Anonymous has steadfastly denied its involvement in the Sony breach, but last month one of the group's veterans said it was the work of several members. The veterans, however, said the collective at large couldn't be blamed for the work of a few. The site anonnews.org is down right now, and an alternate URL, anonnews.yup.name says a dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attack "combined with a spike in legitimate traffic" has made it unavailable.

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Adam Martin