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FBI, Federal Judge Agree Fighting Botnets Means Allowing The FBI To Remotely Install Software On People’s Computers (www.techdirt.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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FBI, Federal Judge Agree Fighting Botnets Means Allowing The FBI To Remotely Install Software On People’s Computers::The ends aren't always supposed to justify the means. And a federal agency that already raised the hackles of defense lawyers around the nation during a CSAM investigation probably shouldn't be in this much of hurry to start sending out unsolicited software to unknowing recipients. But that's the way things work now. As a result…

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, this is a weird one in my opinion. I don't like either option, but I guess if they told the malware to effectively self destruct, then IMO that's okay, with the caveat that the FBI leaves some indicator behind that allows users to know that this happened on their machine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Communicating what happened and how they would do that is an interesting problem. Knowing which machines are infected is simple because they were contacting the control servers regularly. Knowing where the machines are and who they belong to is not. I suspect it would a lot of work and expense to discover the physical addresses of all the machines to communicate officially outside of leaving something on their computer, and writing software to leave some kind of official "calling card" behind that would inform the user what happened is neither trivial and would likely also be upsetting to people. Most would assume the message itself is some kind of scam or mal-ware itself. I'd personally still want to know, especially since I might have the actual mal-ware on backups or other infected machines that are offline, but I'm not altogether surprised if they chose not to inform the users at all.