“I love seeing these kinds of actions by global law enforcement,” said David Shipley, CEO of Canadian cybersecurity awareness firm Beauceron Security. “They are the next best thing to catching and throwing the criminals behind this cybercrime in jail.”
“In cases where there is no reasonable chance of prosecution, especially when the threat actors are in hostile environments, dismantling their infrastructure and removing threats from victims is a big step,” he added. “This is a good example of putting a cost on cybercrime because now they will have to rebuild their botnets. And do something to protect the community.”
A big milestone
Ed Dubrovksy, chief executive of Cypfer, an incident response company, said the international response “is a major milestone in the fight against computer malware, and it takes an unprecedented step by law enforcement to protect people’s digital assets.” However, this functionality has created what could be a very dangerous precedent, where law enforcement sends unauthorized (device owners) commands to users’ PCs to force the devices to do something. Whether this is done after users have given some form of consent or not is to be determined, and is currently unknown.”
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