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.