Over 2 million passwords for popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google and Yahoo accounts have been stolen and posted online, with Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki also featuring on the hitlist.

Internet security firm Trustwave exposed the extensive data hoard, saying in its blog that the responsible botnet – dubbed Pony – had harvested information from thousands of vulnerable computers on a global scale.

The information included login credentials, email addresses and passwords. In total, 1,580,000 website login credentials were stolen, alongside 320,000 email and 41,000 FTP accounts.