Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Feds to remotely delete Coreflood from infected PCs

Feds to remotely delete Coreflood from infected PCs
Digital Trends ^ | April 27, 2011 | Geoff Duncan

Posted on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 5:45:41 PM by decimon

In an unusual move, federal authorities will be contacting computer users with systems infected by the Coreflood botnet Trojan and asking them to agree to allow them to send commands to the malware so it will delete itself. The move comes in the in the wake of a coordinated takedown earlier this month by the FBI and other authorities, in which the U.S. government essentially substituted its own command-and-control servers in place of those used by Coreflood and issued commands telling the program to shut down on infected PCs.

The move reduced activity from the Coreflood botnet by about 90 percent in the United States and by nearly 75 percent worldwide. However, infected PCs still have dormant Coreflood software on them, and the feds would like to get rid of it.
A U.S. District Judge approved the Department of Justice’s request for a preliminary injunction that authorizes the action, giving authorities until May 25 to contact owners of systems infected by Coreflood and obtain consent to remotely remove it from their machines.

However, the DOJ actually argued it didn’t need a judge’s permission to move on its deletion campaign, since it will be seeking written consent from owners of infected systems before going through with the deletion.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note:
The 'Reader Responses; shown on many posts/articles are almost always worthwhile reading.

Often, the comments by readers enhance the posted article greatly, and are informative and interesting.

Hopefully, all will remember to read the reader comments, and post their own as well.
Thanx
*****