The British Metropolitan Police's Computer Crime Unit, the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, and the Finnish Pori Police Department combined to arrest the trio: a 63-year-old Suffolk man, a 28-year-old man in Scotland, and a 19-year-old man in Finland. Police in the two countries raided several residences and seized servers and other computers.
M00P has been linked to a number of worms and Trojans -- including Dogbot, Hackarmy.c, Santabot.a, Shuckbot.a, Rbot.bf, and Tibick.a -- that have been used to hijack large numbers of computers to produce a botnet, said U.K.-based security vendor Sophos Tuesday.
The gang's name is also embedded in the Stinx Trojan, which was widely spammed to Internet users in mid-June 2005.
"It is always a welcome sign when an Internet gang has been disrupted, and we certainly congratulate the police for their work," said Ron O'Brien, a senior security analyst for Sophos, in a statement. "The sad fact is, however, that this is just the tip of the iceberg."
According to Sophos, the gang's unusual name may be a reference either to an episode of the animated South Park television series, or one from the now-in-reruns Seinfeld.