POLITICO: How DOJ took the malware fight into your computer.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/13/how-doj-took-the-malware-fight-into-your-computer-00038932
In the past year, federal prosecutors and FBI agents have increased their
efforts to defeat botnets and contain malware outbreaks by directly removing
malicious code from infected computers, without the knowledge or authorization
of those computers’ owners.
“We have gotten more comfortable, as a government, taking that step,” Adam
Hickey, a deputy assistant attorney general for national security, said in an
interview at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco.
The latest example of this approach came in April, when U.S. authorities wiped
malware off of hacked servers used to control a Russian intelligence agency’s
botnet, preventing the botnet’s operators from sending instructions to the
thousands of devices they had infected. A year earlier, the Justice Department
used an even more expansive version of the same technique to send commands to
hundreds of computers across the country that were running Microsoft’s Exchange
email software, removing malware planted by Chinese government agents and other
hackers.
In both cases, federal prosecutors obtained court orders allowing them to
access the infected devices and execute code that erased the malware. In their
applications for these orders, prosecutors noted that government warnings to
affected users had failed to fix the problems, thus necessitating more direct
intervention.