FBI recently revealed that they have successfully smashed an international cybercrime ring with the help of Facebook. The criminal group included around 10 people, who went on the $850m Butterfly botnet spree. All of them are responsible for multiple variants of the Yahos malware, which is linked to more than 11 million computer takeovers and a massive loss of $850m from stealing credit card and bank account details along with other personal data.

“We 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”, according to the Feds.

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

Botnets have always been a headache for all of us as they cause a massive amount of damage. And the worst part is that they multiply faster than anything. A few months back, Sophos revealed that the ZeroAccess Botnet has over 1 million zombie computers in an army that can earn a staggering amount of $100,000 in a single day. It’s almost that ZeroAccess Botnet has become apparently unstoppable, mutating and evolving, as it bounces its way back and forth across the world. It not only steals financial data, instead making money through advertising – it works by forcing hundreds of pop-up ads to appear on the screen, and by redirecting users to advertising websites, making money off of each click on these ads.