SEATTLE--Striking back at computers that are attacking a company or home
network could be legal under federal nuisance laws, a technology-law expert
said Thursday.
Curtis Karnow, attorney for law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal,
stressed during a speech at the Black Hat Security Briefings conference
here that no court case has yet established precedent regarding the use of
a limited counterstrike to stop Internet attackers, but that nuisance
statutes appear to apply.
"It has a lot of promise...if we can get the court to look at it," Karnow
said. "The law allows you to go in without permission and abate, or stop,
the nuisance. You can even sue the malefactor for the expense of the
abatement."
Nuisance laws allow the state and private individuals to file lawsuits
aimed at ending activities deemed harmful to a community. They have been
used to close buildings that house drug dealers and to shut down
businesses, such as quarries that create excessive dust in a neighborhood.
Karnow pointed to "self help" provisions that allow citizens to take action
to mitigate an obvious nuisance as a way of dealing with intruders and
so-called zombie servers. Under the law, the victim of an attack could
conceivably shut down the offending program on the attacking server--even
if the server belonged to someone else, he said.
Karnow's solution could give hope to system administrators whose networks
are under attack and who have found that petitioning law enforcement
agencies is both slow and frequently ineffective.
Administrators on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) have
for weeks discussed what to do about an estimated 20,000 servers still
infected by the Slammer worm that continues to send an enormous amount of
traffic though the Net. A similar number of computers are believed to be
infected by the Code Red and Nimda worms and pose a threat to servers that
haven't properly been patched.
However, Karnow warned that counterattacks would have to be used
judiciously and only to a limited extent.
"The real problem is collateral damage," he said. "Suppose you screw
up--you hit the wrong machine (or) you shut down an entire computer rather
than just a process. What happens if you are sued, not by a bad guy, but by
an intermediary who was affected by your counterstrike?"
Such issues should continue to deter anyone considering hacking back, he said.
There are only a few known cases of defensive hacking. After the Code Red
worm struck, a security expert created a tool that deleted the Code Red
program and restarted the infected server.
The FBI pulled evidence from a Russian server without authorization after
they successfully arrested two suspected Russian computer hackers in a
sting operation.
"It is a completely untested argument, but I think it is really worth
exploring, because it has the notion of self help and allows aggressive
action to abate the attack," he said. However, he warned anyone from trying
to be "Version 1.0" in testing the law.
"The judge who just learned how to use his cell phone is the person who is
deciding on these technology issues," he said. "And this is beyond the
bleeding edge of the law."
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