The Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit is investigating data recovered from a computer in the United States that was found to contain personal information from hacked computers located in the United Kingdom.

We believe the data has been stolen by the use of a computer virus and it is believed more than 2,300 compromised computers in the UK consisting of 83,000 files have been targeted.

The Met is working with international law enforcement agencies to investigate this global virus infection as it is believed there will be many thousands of computer users around the world who will also have had their computers compromised and data stolen.

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.

The information has been harvested from the computers by a type of malicious code known as a Backdoor. It is too early to establish at this early stage how the computers have been infected.

Officers are in the process of notifying the UK victims of this online attack. Internet Service Providers, banks and other on-line services are also being alerted.

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. You will not be asked to disclose any passwords and the email outlines the specific security instructions to follow.

Police have the details of all the victims involved in this case so if you haven't been contacted you should not be affected.

If you are concerned you may be a victim to any other online criminality please report it to your local police. However, as good practice the unit advise that computer users should regularly update their anti-virus program virus signatures and scan their computers to help avoid becoming a victim. If you make financial transactions on line then regularly check your bank statements to ensure no illegal transactions have taken place.