The U.K. Metropolitan police sent out notices to 3,000 British citizens today that their personal data had been stolen from hacked computers, but the story's even bigger than that... The U.K. Metropolitan police sent out notices to 3,000 British citizens today that their personal data had been stolen from hacked computers, according to a statement. According to the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit, more than 2,300 compromised computers in the UK consisting of 83,000 files have been targeted, and that email addresses and other confidential data has been recovered by police during the investigation including passwords, credit card numbers and information relating to on-line transactions.In their statement, the Metropolitan police mention a “computer virus” as the source of the infection. But thanks to Mikko Hyppönen, Manager of Anti-Virus Research at F-Secure, we know that the story is actually bigger and badder than that. In an address at the Virus Bulletin conference in Montreal, Hyppönen said that the data was actually stolen by a piece of prolific malware known as Haxdoor that has recently been spammed throughout the EU. Haxdoor is a Trojan horse/keylogger program with rootkit stealth capabilities that’s a voracious consumer of information, Hyppönen said. According to F-Secure, this thing steals everything: your Google searches (and we know how much you can learn from those!), e-mail addresses, cached data, Miranda ICQ, MDialer and Webmoney passwords as well as MDialer and RAS (remote access software)phone numbers, settings and credentials. You name it. According to F-Secure, Haxdoor looks for keywords like “bank,” “trade,” “merchant,” “authorize,” and so on. In fact, U.K. authorities figured out how to contact the UK citizens victimized by the Haxdoor installations by combing through a massive data dump that they retrieved from a Web server and looking for names and addresses in the U.K. They found over 2,000 — which means there are A LOT more victims whose information was in that file, but who don’t have the U.K. Metropolitan Police looking out for their best interests. In addition to sending stolen data to a Website, Haxdoor forwards all stolen data to ‘corpse@mailserver.ru,’ an e-mail address owned by the Haxdoor author, who also goes by the name “Korpsov.” According to the Met Police statement, they are “working with international law enforcement agencies to investigate this global virus infection” and that “many thousands of computer users around the world…will also have had their computers compromised and data stolen,” though exact numbers are unknown. The U.K. folks who were victimized in the attack, can expect a very phishy sounding e-mail from the Met Police telling them they’ve been victimized. To quote: “We are contacting victims via email. If you receive one of these emails, it will have an email address of: met.police.uk. Please contact the detectives named within the email on the contact number given.”Still, victims won’t be asked to provide any identifying information like user names or passwords. After all: we already know all that stuff! Still, stay tuned for the Haxdoor warning phishing scam — coming to an inbox near you ! 😉 Security