The National Police in Spain recently arrested five of what are described as members of one of the “most active hacker groups” on the Internet, called the D.O.M. Team. Two of the suspects at 16 years old, the others are 19 or 20.

 

Police say the D.O.M. Team, working in concert, hacked into 21,000 Web pages over a two-year period. One favored method employed by the hackers was to gain access to a Web site and then insert a page of their own making. They are also accused of allegedly disabling Internet pages run under the auspices of U.S., Latin American and Asian government agencies, though the statement by police did not specify which Web sites were manipulated by the suspects.

 

The investigation by Spanish police began in March 2008 after a Spanish political party's site was disabled following the Spanish general election.

 

The five suspects were arrested in Barcelona, Burgos, Malaga and Valencia.

 

Reporters from the second largest daily newspaper in Spain, El Mundo (Spanish for "The World", full name El Mundo del Siglo Veintiuno, "The World of the 21st century") contacted the group, which described itself not as aberrant miscreants, but computer-lovers who raid Web sites to demonstrate to system administrators the vulnerabilities of Web pages in their care.

 

In related news, the Baltic nation of Estonia, which last year accused Russia for weeks of hacker attacks on major portions of its Internet structure after it decided to remove a bronze statue of a Red Army soldier from its capital square, will soon host a NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center, a research center to be established in the Estonian capital of Tallinn as an acknowledgement of Estonia’s role in launching the initiative, which had immediately received strong support from the alliance’s Secretary-General “Jaap” de Hoop Scheffer.

 

On May 15, 2008 in Brussels, Belgium, top military commanders from seven NATO countries and the Allied Command Transformation signed an agreement to create the center. To be specific, the armed forces’ commanders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the inspector general of Germany’s armed forces, and the chiefs of staff of Italy, Spain, and Slovakia, as well as U.S. General James Mattis, Supreme Allied Commander of Transformation, signed the agreement. The seven NATO countries, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Slovakia and Spain, will staff and fund this research hub.

 

After the signing ceremony in Brussels that set forth the agreement to build the center in Estonia, NATO spokesman James Appathurai said, "We have seen in Estonia that a cyber attack can swiftly become an issue of national security… Cyber attacks can cripple societies."

 

The center will conduct research, consultation, training and development of cyber defenses, and will devise capabilities for cyber defense, and provide expert advice periodically as well as in emergencies. NATO policy and the center will assist allied countries as needed in protecting their critical communication and information networks, be they public and non-encrypted networks or encrypted ones. The center will promote the sharing of the best practices in this area throughout NATO, so as to avoid duplication or fragmentation of similar national efforts.

 

The formal opening of the center is planned for 2009, but for all practical purposes the center will be up and running in August, whereupon the U.S. will send an observer to join the initial staff of 30, half of them from the seven founding countries and half from other NATO member countries. Staffing will increase when other NATO allied countries join the center.