Disconnection of Millions of DNSChanger-Infected PCs Delayed

tsu doh nimh writes "Millions of computers infected with the stealthy and tenacious DNSChanger Trojan may be spared a planned disconnection from the Internet early next month if a New York court approves a new request by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, six men accused of managing and profiting from the huge collection of hacked PCs are expected to soon be extradited from their native Estonia to face charges in the United States."

Comments

Let it happen

[jdastrup]

Allowing the infected computers to fail is probably best. They'll stop working, then get replaced or cleaned up. How is that bad?

Re:Let it happen

[vlm]

Allowing the infected computers to fail is probably best. They'll stop working, then get replaced or cleaned up. How is that bad?

Maybe the US govt doesn't want them to be cleaned up because the us govt is involved in them, somehow.

Note I'm not completely tinfoil hat here. I'm not suggesting that the govt wrote the virus or infected the computers. I'm merely suggesting this MIGHT be something like the syphilis experiments done on minorities decades ago... leave them infected, watch carefully, see what happens... Obviously a packet sniffer on the incoming DNS traffic tells you how many there are, you can generate all kinds of interesting graphs and studies and reports... You also have at least one pretty strong data point on security update habits, because they were not updated when infected. I would imagine some interesting data is being generated that would be eliminated if the "experiment" were terminated early.