Feds smash international cybercrime ring with Power of Facebook

The FBI have said that with the help of Facebook, they've taken down an international crime gang who went on an $850m botnet spree.

The ten suspects are allegedly responsible for multiple variants of the Yahos malware, which is linked to more than 11 million computer takeovers and over $850m in losses using the Butterfly botnet, which steals credit card and bank account details along with other personal data.

The feds said they'd nabbed folks from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru, the UK and the US after an investigation that was aided by Facebook's security team.

Yahos targeted Facebook users between 2010 and October 2012, according to the Feds, and the social network's security systems detected the affected accounts and gave out tools to remove the threats.

The creator of the Butterfly botnet was already caught and one of that botnet's customers was the now arrested group of crooks behind the infamous Mariposa botnet. Luis Corrons Granel, a researcher at Panda Security, suggested to The Reg that it's possible that those arrests led to the cybercriminals behind Yahos.

Granel said he hadn't heard of Yahos before, but it was likely that the Butterfly botnet was being used to distribute the malware. ®