Obama Administration Wants More Legal Power To Disrupt Botnets

Trailrunner7 writes: The Obama administration has proposed an amendment to existing United Stated federal law that would give it a more powerful tool to go after botnets such as GameOver Zeus, Asprox and others. In recent years, Justice, along with private security firms and law enforcement agencies in Europe, have taken down various incarnations of a number of major botnets, including GameOver Zeus and Coreflood. These actions have had varying levels of success, with the GOZ takedown being perhaps the most effective, as it also had the effect of disrupting the infrastructure used by the CryptoLocker ransomware.

In order to obtain an injunction in these cases, the government would need to sue the defendants in civil court and show that its suit is likely to succeed on its merits. "The Administration's proposed amendment would add activities like the operation of a botnet to the list of offenses eligible for injunctive relief. Specifically, the amendment would permit the department to seek an injunction to prevent ongoing hacking violations in cases where 100 or more victim computers have been hacked. This numerical threshold focuses the injunctive authority on enjoining the creation, maintenance, operation, or use of a botnet, as well as other widespread attacks on computers using malicious software (such as "ransomware" )," assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell wrote.

Comments

What about the botnets run by the NSA . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Actually, the headline could have been simply shortened to: Obama Administration Wants More Legal Power!

And whatever administration that comes next, will also want more legal power.

Government should be a coordinator, not the hammer

[Aqualung812]

If you have a malicious device connected to an ISP, the ISP should be the one to disconnect it. The problem is that the target of the malicious device is often on another ISP.

Rather than allowing the government to be the hammer and force people offline, the government should create a coordination point where attacks can be reported and the proper ISP and their customers alerted to the activity.

One of the activities could be creating OSS that allows for firewall logs to send attack information to this central resource.

Another could be creating a help page that assists end users with understanding why they're having this issue and how to correct it.

Finally, proposing a Internet remediation zone would be the best end result. Instead of pulling the cord on infected devices, put them on a standard ACL/web filter that only allows them to software updates and AV signatures.

These are harder tasks for any one ISP to do, but a good thing for government to do.

Re:Really? You think?

[TheGratefulNet]

do not give them this power!

they can then 'schwartz you' if they want.

I would not be surprised if they defined 'botnet' as any automated network job or task. which means anything we do that has any automation to it would be 'against the law'.

way too much power, here!

botnets suck but legal means is NOT the way to stop them!

each time we give the government more legal means to punish, its almost always the wrong 'bad guys' that get punished, like aaron.

JUST SAY NO to more US laws. we have too many laws already. why they think that adding MORE laws is a good idea, I'll never undertstand. (well, I do understand, but I'll never LIKE it)

this law, like PATRIOT would be misused eventually. better to not have any law than one that will obviously be misused and probably won't take very long to misuse it, either.

I'm at the point now where "if you want it, I want you to NOT have it" - meaning, laws that politicians want. if you wanted that, that's enough to show me you don't really deserve it.