By Robert Lemos
CNET News.com
February 28, 2003, 4:34 AM PT
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."