According to a statement released on Sunday, Spanish police have arrested four people suspected of carrying out a cyberattack that cost a media website $530,600 and stopped it from working for three weeks in October 2013. The Spanish news website prnoticias asserts the cyberattacks were organized by a former director of a rival news outlet called Intereconomia.

According to The Associated Press, the Spanish police described the suspects of the digital sabotage as a group consisting of one business entrepreneur and three computer experts who were allegedly hired to set forth an illegal attack known as a “distributed denial of service." The attack is a fairly common form of cyberattack in the business world, aimed at rendering resources unavailable to a targeted site’s intended users.

An international investigation, which involved the FBI and Canadian authorities, took 14 months and succeeded in arresting the suspects in Madrid and Tarragona.

Big time cyberattacks such as this latest one have been in the Spanish news for several years now.

In 2011 Spanish authorities arrested three members of the international group of computer hackers known collectively as Anonymous in Barcelona, Valencia and in Almeria.

In 2013 Spanish police arrested eight people suspected of aiding in the theft of more than $60 million from worldwide banks by hacking into credit card processing firms and withdrawing money from cash machines.

That same year, a Dutch citizen was arrested in Spain in connection to a cyberattack against the nonprofit organization Spamhaus.

Outside of all the obvious illegal cyber stuff going, Spain is headed for some isolating Internet situations as Google News, in response to a Spanish law that requires publishers to charge aggregation servicers that re-post passages from their articles, has simply removed all Spanish publishers from their news and decided to shut down their aggregator in Spain.

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