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The FBI Is Now Securing Networks Without Their Owners’ Permission
- LinuxBender 6y agoI probably have a different thought process on this than Bruce, but my analogy would be closer to cattle gates. If a rancher leaves a gate open or the gate is damaged by the cattle and cattle are getting onto the freeway, they become a liability and safety hazard. It is not uncommon for another rancher to round them up, put them back into the right place and secure the gate. The rancher that owns the cattle will owe them a case of beer as a common courtesy. If local authorities have to round up the cattle, the rancher may even be fined. Unpatched and misconfigured servers account for hundreds of billions of lost dollars every year and the FBI Cybercrime division have to spend tax dollars chasing down these issues. They are not staffed to do this. So if a court gave them permission to round up the cattle, so be it. Better them than criminals poaching the cattle causing financial losses and write-offs. To extend the cattle analogy, I would also be happy to see companies being fined for not patching their servers in a timely manor. Can't patch it? Put it behind a firewall/vpn and set up a secure smtp proxy such as postfix to relay email to it from the public and disable public exchange access, or use O365's hosted solution.
- greenyoda 6y agoRelated discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26800481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26800481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26805199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26805199