Microsoft says it freed millions of computers from criminal botnet

BIG TAKEDOWN: The Microsoft office in Bucharest. The vast majority of infected machines, which had been freed by the Citadel botnet, were in the United States, Europe, and Hong Kong. - Reuters

BOSTON: Microsoft Corp said that an assault it led earlier this month on one of the world's biggest cybercrime rings has freed at least 2 million PCs infected with a virus believed to have been used to steal more than US$500mil (RM1.5bil) from bank accounts worldwide.

"We definitely have liberated at least 2 million PCs globally. That is a conservative estimate," Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, said in an interview on Tuesday.