'Pony' botnet makes off with Bitcoins, digital currencies

In a massive cyber attack, cybercriminals have reportedly pilfered account credentials, bitcoins and other digital currencies of digital currency holders by infecting their computers using a virus known as "Pony".

According to security services firm Trustwave, the attackers relied on Pony botnet, a group of infected computers that take orders from a central command-and-control server to steal private data.

Nearly 200,000 systems were infected by the malware with over 700,000 credentials, including website, email and FTP account log-ins stolen in the breach, PC World reported.

Meanwhile, the Pony botnet is said to have been used in a few other attacks recently, including the theft of some 2 million log-ins for sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Ziv Mador, director of security research at Chicago-based Trustwave said that as more people use digital currencies over time, and use digital wallets to store them, it's likely we'll see more attacks to capture the wallets, adding that most of the wallets that were broken into were unencrypted.