Police hijack a botnet and remotely kill 850k malware infections
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Doesn't the government have to authorize this kind of thing in order for it to proceed, as a prerequisite? Do we also say the government IPO-ed when a company IPOs? It can't happen without authorization. Just trying to understand this rationale.
Seems weird to give credit for allowing something versus the actual doing of the thing.
Imagine that flaw they found turned out to have been a trap and they bricked 850k devices.
I feel like being too lazy to update probably means you don’t care anyway.
It sounds silly in a way but legally seems like a good process.
Still I often wonder what a well funded and legitimately defensive gov agency could be capable of accomplishing if they wanted to seriously take on this problem.
According to the article, the police didn't do much of the actual work -- the police were only involved to give legal approvals necessary for Avast to avoid legal trouble.
Edit: Added the original quoted comment text, OP has since edited
If they don’t have the advanced skill set needed to shut them down they can always contract it until they develop their own in-house experts.
> The malware also has wormable properties
Malware doesn't have wormable properties, the bug being exploited to implement the worm is the thing that is 'wormable' in industry parlance. I think what they mean here is that the malware is a worm
This is an exploit of the malware though, not some other third-party app that just happened to be on the same box.