Kudos to FBI agents in Pittsburg, Federal Magistrate Judge Lenihan, and all involved in bringing this to the surface.


SNIP
"In addition, the victim allowed the FBI to utilize a network tap on her home network that allowed the FBI to observe the network traffic leaving the home router.”


That allowed the bureau to identify a key weakness in the malware.
*If a victim reboots an infected router, the malicious plugins all disappear, and only the core malware code survives.
*That code is programmed to connect over the Internet to a command-and-control infrastructure set up by the hackers.
*First it checks for particular images hosted on Photobucket.com that held hidden information in the metadata.
*If it can’t find those images—which have indeed been removed from Photobucket—it turns to an emergency backup control point at the hard-coded web address ToKnowAll[.]com.

“One plug-in lets the hackers eavesdrop on the victim’s Internet traffic;
another targets a protocol used in the electric grid. A third lets the attacker cripple any or all of the infected devices at will.”

On Tuesday, FBI agents in Pittsburg asked federal Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan in Pittsburgh for an order directing the domain registration firm Verisign to hand the ToKnowAll[.]com address over to the FBI, in order to “further the investigation, disrupt the ongoing criminal activity involving the establishment and use of the botnet, and assist in the remediation efforts,” according to court records. Lenihan agreed,

that all this spam that tried to get you to open and read and click was capable of implanting bits of code on your computer that could later be drawn together for unclear purposes. So someone' known about this for quite a while.

One of the things that has been slowing down the Russia investigation is the threat of retaliation through these means. Now that pressure’s been taken off.

putin's puppets.

"U.S. Takes Down Russian Botnet Believed to Be Used in Election Hacking After Suspect Arrested in Spain"

April 10, 2017
http://fortune.com/2017/04/10/us-russian-kelihos-botnet/

I'm losing hope that ANYTHING we do will matter. We badly need different tactics.

Dialogue from Mississippi Burning:

"Anderson: These people are crawling out of the SEWER, MR. WARD! Maybe the gutter's where we outta be!"

Our nation was attacked by Russia. Now, we are fighting back. It feels like a relief