Villeneuve has handed over information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and U.K. authorities. And the researchers have also notified Facebook, Google and various ISPs about the fraudulent and compromised accounts. They have identified 20,000 fake Facebook accounts; 500,000 fake Gmail and Blogspot accounts, and thousands of compromised FTP accounts used by the gang.

They hope that these activities will disrupt the botnet's operations, but Villeneuve has no illusions about Koobface being stopped. "I think that they'll probably start up pretty soon, and they'll probably try to recover as many of their bots as soon as they can," he said.

The IDG News Service