Spanish authorities arrested three suspects, Friday, believed to be involved in the recent hackings of companies like Sony and Spanish bank, Barcelona, Valencia and Almeria (BBVA). The suspects are accused of being members in the Spanish branch of hacktivist group Anonymous according to Spanish authorities. 

Anonymous has been under suspicion recently for the attacks to Sony's Playstation Network, when Sony reported they found evidence within the lines of codes found in the intrusion to their system that pointed to the group's involvment.  

Anonymous denied the speculations saying, "If a legitimate and honest investigation into the credit card is conducted, Anonymous will not be found liable. While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our 'leadership' does not condone credit card theft."

According to the investigation by Spain's Brigada de Investigación Tecnológica (BIT), however, evidence shows the three arrested were in fact the minds behind distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to various organizations. 

From Ars Technica:

With these arrests, Spain joins the UK, US, andNetherlands in having taken police action against Anonymous members. During the investigation, more than 2,000,000 lines of IRC logs were examined to track down the people involved.

From BBC:

The arrests were the culmination of an investigation that began in October 2010. It involved Spanish cyber police combing through millions of lines of chat logs to identify who was co-ordinating the group's activities.

Some of the attacks made by Anonymous members used a web-based tool called Loic to bombard target sites with data. The websites of PayPal, Mastercard and Amazon were all targeted using this tool.

With news of cyberattacks growing, the U.S. government has taken steps to deter attacks by annoucning that it considers cyberattacks as an act of war. This, however, has not detered hacktivit groups online. 

The blog, AnonOps Communications, which reports news about the hacktivits have been active with calls to action since news of the arrests.