Something we’ve suspected for a long time is confirmed. Windows is basically spyware and a honeypot.
Quote: " removing malicious code from Americans’ computers simply to help them" end quote.
U huh… sure you do.
I don’t know of any operations like that over here (Europe), but i’m glad to be running Linux at home.
This is 1984 if i’ve ever seen it.
Removing code and then what? Add a little extra to keep things “safe”?
I wouldn’t trust it one bit.
Haha! I seriously doubt there’s a friendly FBI agent manually removing these scripts by hand. It’s probably also a script that deletes the other script that the FBI put there by exploiting the same vulnerability the hackers did.
This vulnerability is petty convenient, what incentive does the FBI have to fix it?
Before I say anything I agree that Windows is spyware, just not in this case.
There’s no mention of using a backdoor, it’s more likely the FBI simply used the same vulnerability to patch it. It reminds me of BrickerBot, a malware designed to gain entry to and brick (destroy) any vulnerable IoT device it could find. The FBI being sort of a PatcherBot.
“The operation, which the Department of Justice announced Tuesday it had authorized with a warrant”
If that warrant didn’t describe every server and owner they’d be targeting it’s a General Warrant (as far as I understand) which is un-constitutional because of how easy General Warrants are to abuse.
There’s also a firefighter perspective. If there’s a fire in a building that’s substantially harming everyone who walks in and out which the owner won’t do anything about, should a firefighter be allow to go in and put it out? That’s essentially what the FBI is doing here.
To flip that again, should companies with terrible security policies be left to suffer the consequences and by extension their customers which’d make them change companies and in so doing create market incentives for companies investing in security instead of having the FBI bail them out? Or is the threat too great to leave it to the market?
How this pans out and how it’s talked about is going to be really interesting.
I am not a lawyer, but from what I’ve read, we have a Federal law that would normally criminalize this type of white-hat hacking. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is certainly a questionable piece of legislation, but it is the law of the land. Despite this federal law, we have one judge in Texas who declared that the FBI can ignore this law, and hack any servers that they believe are in the USA. Something just seems wrong about that. I thought that search warrants had to be a lot more specific as to the location of the property to be searched. And, while I could understand a ‘States Rights’ 10th amendment argument that the Texas judge might have the right to override Federal law within Texas, I’m not sure what authority that judge should have over other states.
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I agree. Good intentions or not, if this story is true then the FBI and all involved in approving the warrant are guilty of crimes.
I will never approve of any process involving private property where the owner(s) of the private party are not involved (in this case notified). The proper thing to do here would have been to notify the owners and provide them with the details on how the remove this malware/virus.
I’m not even going to discuss the invasion of privacy.
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