Irrelevant. If it is authorised by the police, then they did it, and while Avast is the tech people behind it, attributing it to the police is more correct (it could've been some other tech company, but only the police can authorise such an attack).
> Irrelevant. If it is authorised by the police, then they did it, and while Avast is the tech people behind it, attributing it to the police is more correct (it could've been some other tech company, but only the police can authorise such an attack).
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.
Well I don't know how France works but in the US, no the government doesn't need to authorize this. The police are required to follow the law just like everybody else. A judge could grant some sort of ex-parte legal judgement making an action legal. The police here just said "yeah we don't care." The article says the prosecutors gave the go ahead, my guess is that they said "Yeah we got all the evidence we need, shut her down" and that's what happened.
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
I guess "wormable" implies it could duplicate to other computers via command & control instead of just duplicating to every computer it finds, but it's unclear.
I think that's a little pedantic. The wormable properties are the vulnerabilities the malware is exploiting. The vulnerability and malware could both be considered to have wormable properties.
Yes, this is a good thing, as long as it's done carefully and is fully limited to running a bot uninstall command. Most bot malware comes with uninstall commands built-in. This kind of thing has been done for decades.
By the time the AV companies get police involved there always seems to be a million infections. I guess they don’t have resources to do this often and locations are disparate, often coming from off limits regions for western police.
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.
> By the time police get involved there always seems to be a million infections. I guess they don’t have resources to do this often.
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
That's why they do it with careful monitoring and approval from law enforcement. If you tried to do this vigilante-style, no matter how good your intentions, you're asking for trouble.
However _your_ (infected) machine is causing havoc to other machines and infrastructure. The Police would have a right to, say, disable a burglar alarm that doesn't stop after a day, etc. It's the same sort of thing.
25 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] threadDoesn'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.
> 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.
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.
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.