FBI CONSIDERS USING ‘INTERNET KILL’ ON MARCH 8

FBI to Take Down a Chunk of Internet on March 8 in Battle Against Malware

From Dateline Zero

WHY IS THE FBI DOING THIS?

The FBI claims that malware called “DNSChanger” has infected computers, causing people’s browsers to be redirected to servers hosting fraudulent websites. The malware was particularly viscous in that it prevented browsers from accessing websites that might offer a fix.

After arresting the party responsible for this (in Estonia), the FBI replaced the servers with their own. The FBI required a court order to do this, and that order expires March 8. After that date, the FBI servers go down — and any networks that had been infected with this worm will be redirecting traffic to nowhere.

Who had been infected? Half of all Fortune 500 companies, according to Gizmodo.

According to RT, security company IID (Internet Identity) believes that half of all Fortune 500 companies and more than two dozen major government entities in the US were still infected as of early 2012.

“Unless they take the proper steps to eradicate the Trojan from their systems,” RT reported, “millions of users worldwide will be left hog-tied, helplessly attempting to navigate to nonexistent servers and, in effect, without the Web.”

Removing the malware is pretty easy, as long as you know you have it. But anyone who hasn’t removed it may find they have trouble connecting this March. To learn more about checking a computer or network for the Trojan, DNS Changer Working Group and the FBI are offering to help.

More on this story is available at Krebs on Security, BetaBeat, and Geekosystem.

THE U.S. GOV’T ALREADY SEEMS TO HAVE THEIR ‘KILL SWITCH’

The ironic thing about the MegaUpload case was that the Federal Government asking for broader powers to fight “online piracy” seemed silly. Obviously, Federal Agencies already exercise such powers — they shut down the website without due process, stormed private property and made arrests in several different countries, and continue to hold Kim Dotcom in prison without opportunity to post bail.

This seems to be a similar situation. Most people paying attention are aware that, from Joe Lieberman to the FBI, various people and agencies within the American political class have been begging for a so-called “Internet kill switch” for years. But, apparently, the government has already assumed such powers over the Internet.

According to this story, a federal agency can allow Internet traffic to run through federally-owned servers; and the same government agency can cut them off. Let’s keep this in mind the next time Joe Lieberman, or anyone else, complains that the government needs more power over the Internet.

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Original post at Dateline Zero