Two million PCs globally, including machines inside UK and US government departments, have been taken over by malicious hackers.

Security experts Finjan traced the giant network of remotely-controlled PCs, called a botnet, back to a gang of cyber criminals in Ukraine, the BBC reported Wednesday.

Several PCs inside six UK government bodies were compromised by the botnet. Finjan has contacted the London Metropolitan Police with details of the government PCs and it is now investigating.

Once a machine has been compromised, it can be instructed to download further software, which puts the machine at the mercy of malicious hackers.

The compromised PCs are capable of reading e-mail addresses, copying files, recording keystrokes, sending spam and capturing screen shots.

Once a single machine inside a corporate network has been made part of the botnet it puts other machines on the network at risk.

Finjan reports that the botnet is under the control of six criminals who are able to remotely control the infected machines.

Almost half of the infected machines were in the US. Six percent of the botnet, about 114 000 machines from 52 different organisations, were from the UK, among them a single PC inside the BBC network.

Many of the infected machines will have been caught by routine information security policies at firms, but Finjan says many of the botnet PCs are still active.

More than 70 different national government agencies from around the world were caught up in the malicious network.

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