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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Did the FBI get permission to run their software on all those machines? This seems illegal.

You should read through the search warrant to see the lengths that they went through to get permission from the courts to do so.

Regardless I think it’s an interesting question as well but my position is that if these machines are already compromised I’d rather have them run the “uninstaller” than the victims continue to receive commands from the botnet controller and cause additional collateral damage.

They didn’t know where all the machines were physically located and thus did not have permission from the court system in those countries.

The operation was performed in concert with other governments. See https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/qakbot-malware-disrupted-inte.... I’ve worked with some of the partners involved on previous operations and they are top notch - while like I said I think this is a legitimate argument either way (should governments have the ability to actively disrupt malicious activity), I am on the side of taking action as has been done here.

So no problem if others break the law (in foreign countries, too), then? "Top notch"? I wonder ifvthat would apply to the feds in other countries 'fixing' US computers. Nb. Not having a dog inbthe fight, I doverr towards keeping anyone the fuck out of my pc. I could appreciate a pop-up though, explaingvwhatcwas going on and how to fix it.

In this case there is someone already “the fuck in your pc”. It’s just a group of cyber criminals looking to monetize said pc with mostly illicit activity. As the sibling pointed out, the pop up would require code execution so … they would necessarily be in your pc already.

That said, I would imagine the pop up would be where this is going over time.

If they can display a pop-up, they're already in your computer running code.

Disagree. Law enforcement shouldnt be able to interact with infected computers at all if they dont have the explicit order.

There is a link in the article to the multiple warrants the FBI were able to get. I’m guessing that most likely has the answer.

They did, though they really shouldn't need to

If an autonomous driving car is taken over by a hacker, and starts running people over, how fast would you expect the police to block it/shoot its tires?

This is a poor analogy. Most of the infected computers that the FBI accessed aren’t even located in the US. The FBI has no jurisdiction in those countries.

Correct, which is why the warrant was limited to computers in the United States (I don't know how they went about this in practice).

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-08/23mj4244_warrant_redacted...

They said they retrieved IP addresses and "routing information", doing fine grained geo ip lookups is impossible, but the accuracy of country of origin is very high, especially in the US

> geo ip lookups is impossible

impossible is the wrong word here, its just unnecessary. The Feds can (and do) definitely contact domestic & international ISPs to perform near 100% accurate lookups.

To go back to the car analogy this is like the police getting approval to shoot the tires and then closing their eyes when they pull the trigger.

Right the municipal police would be the authority to do that, not the FBI

do you have a better analogy thats not an appeal to authority? we’re not in grade school anymore and so not every authority is deputized for every thing

If AI vehicles don’t have a kill switch they should be sued into oblivion.

This kind of thinking only works when you can trust the folks who have access to that switch.

The manufacturer?

Edit: doesn’t Ford and others with the constant connectivity already have something like this?

The FBI has broad authority from Congress to engage in cyberwarfare extraterritoriality , and they also got a broad warrant for anything that happened to be in the United States

You could probably challenge the warrant in court, fortunately that won’t reinstall the botnet but if you also feel this causes you damages, you can further aim to get paid for those damages

Good luck with that if you were an operator

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