Three computer programmers were arrested on June 27 in Britain and Finland on suspicion of being involved in an international conspiracy to spread viruses via spam e-mails, British police said. They are alleged to have targeted UK businesses since at least 2005: thousands of computers are thought to have been infected world-wide.
The men are all suspected of being members of a group known online by the name M00P. The viruses, sent as attachments to spam e-mails, run in the background on an infected computer without the user's knowledge.
Once installed, they allowed the criminals to access any private and commercial data stored on the computer.