Fight Fire With Fire
The Storm BOTnet has been rampaging across the Internet for years. Despite having inspired new BOTnets and other malicious attack, Storm remains quite active itself. To date, BOTnets have been notoriously difficult to thwart - typically requiring network segments to be shut down, computers wiped clean, etc as there has generally been no "digital cure" to getting rid of them. Researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have decoded the mechanisms by which the Storm BOTnet controls itself and issues its polymorphic adjustments. Given that, they claim it is possible to eradicate these BOTnets using their own control mechanisms as the erasure/removal tool. The problem is that in doing so, the cure is technically as nefarious as the BOTnet itself by essentially accessing the zombie computer via the same unauthorized (read illegal) entry vector and making unsolicited changes to the zombie computer. If such a removal vector was improved and monitored, in the name of computer security - should law enforcement be able to do this?