Agents line up at a non-descript door which houses command and control servers for a criminal botnet. They enter with a court order to shut it down and seize the servers--but these agents aren't law enforcement--they're from Microsoft. Somewhere across the ocean, a domain goes offline. Customers--some legit, some not--lose their work product. They are on the receiving end of civil asset forfeiture by ICE or DHS which seized the domain with no warning and scant due process. These are but two of the ways the law is pushing its own boundaries to go on the offensive to deal with sophisticated and complex cybercrime. It's time we stop and pause to review these tactics--the results might just surprise you.
Michael Schearer ("theprez98") is the founder of MyFreeState and the Assault on Privacy, projects which document abuses of freedom and liberty. He is a Senior Penetration Tester at Booz Allen and a law student at UDC- DCSL. He spent nearly nine years in the Navy as an EA-6B Prowler ECMO. His military experience includes aerial combat missions over Afghanistan and Iraq and nine months on the ground doing counter-IED with the Army. He is a graduate of Georgetown’s National Security Studies Program and a speaker at ShmooCon, DEFCON, HOPE, and other conferences. Michael lives in Maryland with his wife and children.