politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles. Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to US politics and contain quality and original content. Social Media adjacent hosts like Substack are allowed, but ONLY if they tie back to a company/subsidiary. No personal or friend group blogs and no self-promotion. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and re-hosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing other users of being bots or paid actors.
- No memes, trolling, misinformation, or low-effort posts/comments (including reposts). If you see posts like this that anger you, do not engage. Report, block, and live a happier life than they do. Any slap-fight is subject to comment removals. Fights full of rule violations will result in temporary bans to cool off.
- No manipulating votes via bots or alt accounts; this will result in permanent bans. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in an account ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be permanently banned.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules and use critical thinking when reading, posting, and commenting. Users that repeatedly have comments or posts removed, weaponize reports, or violate the code of conduct, will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. The reason(s) behind moderator action(s) are publicly available through the Modlog.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
I can't say that I'm against this, if used appropriately (which of course Trump won't). For example against entities their respective juristictions do nothing against, like North Korean hackers or Russian bot farms. It's no secret that Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, to name a few, are actively directing hacker groups.
It is a bad idea. The problem is that counter-hacks don't work.
Any somewhat decent hacker knows the secret of backups and botnets. They don't attack using their own PCs but some random grandma's hacked bot PC. So when you counter-hack them, you just nuke random useless bot PCs, which doesn't harm the hacker at all. And if you manage to hack their own infrastructure, they just wipe it and upload the backup.
So what's more likely to happen under a scheme like this is that the US hacker will likely just hack russian infrastructure or companies, so doing the same thing we hate about russia.
Also, stuff like that tends to decrease security for everyone.
You are correct, but I just want to mention that the guys operating botnets are not usually the smart ones — they're just the skids who are have the patience to actually do social engineering and phishing, or coming up with clever stuff to hide malware in.
A lot of the time, the operators of these large networks are caught simply because they didn't think they needed to hide the IP, MAC or Hostname of the orchestrating machine. Sometimes it is as easy as supoening the purchase records for an off-the-shelf VPS. One time, an operator was caught because a text file captured that it was encoded using a very specific country keyboard type.
That might be outdated in many cases. Botnet operators usually are infrastructure providers nowadays. Hardly anyone operates and uses a botnet at the same time. Usually you have a very professional group who create and run the botnet, and they then rent it out to another person or group who then actually use the botnet.
Getting caught is also not really the issue at hand, we are talking about counter-hacking against hackers operating from countries that don't care about what these hackers are doing. Can't rely on e.g. russian police to bust a group of russian hackers who hack US companies.
So finding these hackers is hardly of help, and hacking them to destroy their setups or something like that also hardly matters, since they can quickly recreate anything that was destroyed.