FBI gets its own worm virus
December 18, 2001 8:58 AM   Subscribe

FBI gets its own worm virus The BadTrans.B worm dumps username, password and keystrokes to an email address that happens to reside on rotten.com's servers. The FBI decide they want it. Rotten.com smells a rat, disagrees, and posts a portion of data for everyone to see. They're going to be pissed...
posted by wibbler (9 comments total)
 
Surely this is hugely subversive, even for the FBI? More on the story here.
posted by wibbler at 9:00 AM on December 18, 2001


they don't disclose username/passwords 'for legal reasons'
posted by wibbler at 9:20 AM on December 18, 2001


It says the Logged Keystroke Data search (email content) has been disabled. The rest of the search boxes work temperamentally at best.

Try This. (It didn't work in the MeFi preview 6 out of 7 tries. Try entering a common name in the passwords field.)
posted by Hankins at 10:02 AM on December 18, 2001


"...to an email address that happens to reside on rotten.com's servers.": This is inaccurate, the email address resides on an ISP that is not connected to rotten.com, Monkeybrains.
posted by atandt at 1:29 PM on December 18, 2001


Um, folks:

(1) Person commits crime involving data theft.
(2) FBI investigate crime.
(3) FBI collects evidence of crime.
(4) Evidence of crime includes stolen data (the very object of the crime).
(5) FBI collects stolen data (see step 3).

Am I missing something?
posted by Mid at 9:44 PM on December 18, 2001


Am I missing something?

Yes.

(6) FBI later misuses stolen data to infringe upon the rights of citizens.
posted by phalkin at 2:18 AM on December 19, 2001


Phalkin -- Fine, but there is no evidence here that the FBI has misused the data in question here. You may believe that the FBI has a tendency to misuse evidence it collects, but that is really a separate issue.
posted by Mid at 6:24 AM on December 19, 2001


Mid - the crime is provable from the infected machine. There is an unwanted executable trying to distribute data to other servers as well as replicate itself. In fact you could easily run it on a closed network to prove what it intends to do and see that it behaves as reported.


No, I don't see why they need the data from these servers. I don't even see how it could provide a useable trail back to the originators - unless they managed to infect themselves!
posted by dodgygeezer at 6:42 AM on December 19, 2001


Dodgy -- same reason you need the victim's body in a murder or the kilo of cocaine in a drug bust. The crime (in part) is stealing data. The law requires the gov't to prove that data was actually stolen. The most obvious way to do this is to present the data in court.
posted by Mid at 7:15 AM on December 19, 2001


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