Interesting article by Jeremy Kirk about how Dutch police may have broken the law in an attempt to get control of a botnet and to warn innocent users that their systems were infected:
Dutch police took unprecedented action in taking down a botnet on Monday: They uploaded their own program to infected computers around the world, a move that likely violated computer crime laws.
The program causes a computer’s Web browser to redirect to a special site set up by the Netherlands Police Agency, where users are informed their computer is infected with Bredolab, a password-stealing malicious software program.
Dutch police did that by taking command of 143 Web servers used to control computers infected with Bredolab. The servers belong to LeaseWeb, one of the top hosting providers in Europe, which was informed in August of the problem by police and other computer security experts, said Alex de Joode, LeaseWeb’s security officer.
Read more on PCWorld.