U.S. authorities say they have shut down a computer crime ring that ran an international fraud scheme and likely infected more than 2 million computers worldwide in the past decade.

The malicious software program dubbed Coreflood was stopped when five command and control computers were seized, after a Connecticut court gave the go-ahead to take over the five servers, the Justice Department said on Wednesday.

A civil complaint against 13 unnamed defendants was also filed by the Connecticut district attorney's office, accusing them of wire fraud and bank fraud. The Justice Department said it had an ongoing criminal investigation.

Seizure of the computers effectively shut down the alleged crime ring, which used the Coreflood botnet to infect computers with keylogging software to steal user names, passwords and financial and other information from corporations and people, the Justice Department said.

The seizure of the Coreflood servers and Internet domain names is expected to prevent criminals from using Coreflood or computers infected by Coreflood for their nefarious purposes, Attorney David Fein for the District of Connecticut said in a statement.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Gary Hill)

Cybercrime