Digital activists linked to the Anonymous collective, a disparate cohort of hackers from around the world, have claimed responsibility for a fresh wave of cyberattacks against a number of Spanish government websites as part of a pro-Catalonia protest campaign.

Multiple accounts with Anonymous' signature Guy Fawkes masks have been tweeting hashtags in recent weeks including #opCatalunya, #FreeCatalonia and #OpSaveCatalonia. They claimed to have taken several state websites offline. The website of Spain's Ministry of Public Works and Transport was hacked to display a "Free Catalonia" slogan.

Facebook has been fined 1.2 million euros ($1.4 million) for allegedly collecting personal information from users in Spain that could then be used for advertising, the national data protection watchdog said.

The fine stemmed from an investigation into the social network company conducted alongside similar probes in Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The 1.2 million euro fine is a fraction of Facebook’s quarterly revenue of about $8 billion and stock market capitalization of around $435 billion. AEPD said it found three cases in which Facebook had collected details of its millions of Spanish users without informing them how such information would be used.

Police have arrested a former executive at conservative media group Intereconomía and three computer experts for launching online attacks against the Spanish public relations news website, PR Noticias.

Luis Sans is alleged to have hired hackers to launch distributed denial of service attacks on a media industry news site which went down for three weeks as the result of the coordinated action and lost an estimated €425,000 as a result. A 14-month investigation led to the arrests in the provinces of Madrid and Tarragona. Eventually, the probe uncovered evidence that a Spanish businessman may have been behind the attack.