Leslie R. Caldwell, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice writes about the government’s proposal to expand its powers to shut down botnets:
Current law gives federal courts the authority to issue injunctions to stop the ongoing commission of specified fraud crimes or illegal wiretapping, by authorizing actions that prevent a continuing and substantial injury.
[…]
The problem is that current law only permits courts to consider injunctions for limited crimes, including certain frauds and illegal wiretapping. Botnets, however, can be used for many different types of illegal activity. They can be used to steal sensitive corporate information, to harvest email account addresses, to hack other computers, or to execute DDoS attacks against web sites or other computers. Yet — depending on the facts of any given case — these crimes may not constitute fraud or illegal wiretapping. In those cases, courts may lack the statutory authority to consider an application by prosecutors for an injunction to disrupt the botnets in the same way that injunctions were successfully used to incapacitate the Coreflood and Gameover Zeus botnets.
The Administration’s proposed amendment would add activities like the operation of a botnet to the list of offenses eligible for injunctive relief. Specifically, the amendment would permit the department to seek an injunction to prevent ongoing hacking violations in cases where 100 or more victim computers have been hacked. This numerical threshold focuses the injunctive authority on enjoining the creation, maintenance, operation, or use of a botnet, as well as other widespread attacks on computers using malicious software (such as “ ransomware ” ).
Read more on the DOJ’s blog.