Cybersecurity

Using a Bomb to Kill a Bug: FBI Forces Malware on Innocent Internet Users

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a motion in a Maryland court asking for the FBI to justify its action of infecting the computers of thousands of innocent internet users in an operation against a single website hosting child pornography.

In 2013, the FBI seized servers belonging to Freedom Hosting Network (FHN), an ISP hosting a variety of websites only visible on the anonymous Tor network. The servers were seized because child pornography was hosted on one of its websites, unbeknownst to FHN. As a part of its investigation, the agency infected the server with Network Investigation Technique (NIT) software.

NIT behaves much like malware, installing itself secretly, without a user's knowledge.

An FBI warrant enabling the deployment of NIT ran from the end of July 2013 to August 5 of that year. On August 4, a TorMail user noticed that an email service website hosted on the same Freedom server, attempted to install unwanted software later found to be similar to NIT used by the agency.