Spain

Spain on Monday met US Ambassador James Costos, summoned to explain the latest revelations in a growing scandal over the US snooping on telephone and online communications of ordinary citizens and world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The news emerged as a European Parliament delegation was to begin a three-day mission to Washington to probe the impact of the surveillance on EU citizens' "fundamental rights" and discuss suspending an EU-US agreement on the transfer of bank data in the wake of the scandal.

Spanish authorities announced Wednesday that they had arrested 10 people who were allegedly involved in a massive “ransomware” ring. The European Cybercrime Centre estimated that the criminal operation "affected tens of thousands of computers worldwide, bringing in profits in excess of €1 million euros ($1.34 million) per year."

Anonymous has recently joined the Spanish anti-government protests, their first target being the website of the country’s National Police. However, Operation Spain didn’t stop there.

A number of six websites managed by the Spanish government have been targeted, and this time the hackers didn’t settle for distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. Instead, they leaked the sites’ databases.