FBI Monitoring Hacking Targets For Retaliation

An anonymous reader writes: As high profile security breaches continue to grab headlines, little is being done visibly by the government to prevent future attacks. This is prompting some victims (and potential victims) to find creative ways to stop the hackers. The FBI is now concerned that U.S. companies and institutions are themselves breaking laws by retaliating with cyberattacks of their own. "In February 2013, U.S officials met with bank executives in New York. There, a JPMorgan official proposed that the banks hit back from offshore locations, disabling the servers from which the attacks were being launched ... Federal investigators later discovered that a third party had taken some of the servers involved in the attack offline, according to the people familiar with the situation. Based on that finding, the FBI began investigating whether any U.S. companies violated anti-hacking laws in connection with the strike on those servers, according to people familiar with the probe."

Comments

why they are concerned

[Charliemopps]

They are concerned because some of these Attacks are perpetrated by the FBI/NSA/CIA.
Can't have people retaliating against their own infiltration operations...

Too bad the internet's down in North Korea, they'd be interested in this story for sure!

If the government can't defend you...

[Anonymous Coward]

...should you not defend yourself?

Not real hackers

[MichaelMacDonald]

Normally I would be against this, but nowadays hackers are mostly just extortionists. Not to mention the damage they've done to the work done by real hackers trying to protect freedom. Really, I think this generation of hackers just need to be purged so the scene can get back to normal.

Re:Can shoot a person, can't take down a server

[Immerman]

I don't know, seems like in a world where cyber-weapons are routinely deployed, the right to bear arms might reasonably be construed to include cyber-weapons. Especially when you consider that, at the time of writing, the right to bear arms was pretty clearly a protection of the people's ability to effectively rebel against a lawful but non-representative government.

Of course having the right to *have* such weapons, and the right to *use* them, especially indiscriminately, are completely different things. Deploy a weapon likely to have significant collateral damage and you'd better be ready to suffer the full force of the law for the damage you do to bystanders, even if disabling the primary target was a clear-cut case of self defense.