A man suspected of writing a Trojan horse to steal confidential banking information from net users has been arrested in Madrid by Spanish police. The 37 year-old suspect (known only by his initials J.A.S.) is alleged to have used P2P networks to distribute an unnamed Trojan, which allowed him to activate webcams and snoop on users as well as nicking sensitive data.

According to Spanish police, the suspect was caught red-handed "with documents stolen from computers, as well as photos and recordings, many of them compromising for their owners" when police raided his apartment this week. The Spanish Civil Guard said it began investigating the case, in an operation dubbed "Operation Tic-Tac", in July 2004 after an Alicante man noticed his PC was behaving unusually and reported his suspicions to the authorities.

Although the Trojan at the centre of the case has not been named its functionality is similar to that of Rbot-GR, the "Peeping-Tom" worm, first discovered in August 2004.

Last year a 27-year-old Spanish man was sentenced to two years in prison for writing a Trojan horse said to have infected over 100,000 computers. ®

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