Police authorities have made a big bust in Spain, tracking down a group responsible for widespread malicious malware online.

The Spanish officers made the arrests in Madrid of a ring of computer criminals using a “botnet” attack to invade 13 million computers, including PCs in many major companies.

Speaking of one of the masterminds of this Mariposa botnet, a police representative said “I don’t think there’s anything about this guy that makes him smarter than any of the other botnet guys, but the (Mariposa) software, it’s very professional, it’s very effective. It came alive and started spreading and it got bigger than him.”

And now the three men are in something bigger than all of them, but hopefully computer security will be a bit easier to maintain for a little while.