Spanish virus writer arrested

A 23 year-old has been arrested in Spain for allegedly writing the Raleka-A virus.

The man from Madrid is the first to be charged with such a crime in the country. The virus hit computers worldwide in August 2003 and managed to infect around 120,000 computers in two weeks, according to a police spokeswoman.

The man is believed to the leader of a hacking group, Akelarre, where he went under the alias 900K. The authorities managed to track down the suspect by mounting a technical investigation of the virus, the Guardia Civil said, adding they had also impounded several computers at the time of the arrest.

The virus itself is almost a precursor to the Blaster worm, which caused carnage to email systems in August, by using a Microsoft security hole to allow the hacker to gain control of the machine.

Graham Cluley, Sophos' senior technology consultant, said in a statement that with virus writers currently getting more police attention and Microsoft's reward scheme to back them up, the criminals might want to think twice before embarking on a cybercrime spree.

"The Raleka arrest further illustrates that computer crime authorities around the world are better equipped than ever at hunting down the perpetrators of hacking and virus crimes. Virus writers should be asking themselves whether it's really worth taking the risk," he said.