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Comment by yafbum | Hacker News Reader

Cool use of the botnet's capabilities against itself

But no arrests announced? I wish the people responsible for this were made an example of, as opposed to being basically free to start over (it seems).

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They are probably outside of US jursidiction and also seizing servers is much easier than catching a cybercriminal who actually knows how to cover their tracks.

This feels like the fire department congratulating it self for putting out fires instead of capturing the arsonist.

Isn't that exactly what the fire department should be doing?

I don't understand the criticism, could you explain why you view this in a negative light?

Arresting people is a pretty core part of the FBI's job.

This seems needlessly critical. If the fire department puts out a fire, it seems like most people would consider that a good use of resources.

In this case, the comments seem irrationally critical, to the point of being unconstructive.

I think the point they are trying to make is that there will still be fires started by the arsonist, so celebrating a single fire being put out while the arsonist is likely busy trying to start another fire looks bad. Even though, as you point out, the Fire Department isn't going to be making any arrests for arson, that's the Police Department's job.

I'm not sure the analogy applies perfectly anyway, since it was "only" a single "fire" in which "only" 700,000 victims were affected.

> This feels like the fire department congratulating it self for putting out fires instead of capturing the arsonist.

Do firefighters perform law enforcement duties in your jurisdiction?

Most of the large-scale botnet and ransomware activities are operating out of Russia. Not exactly a country that is going to collaborate with US law enforcement.

Yes where are the arrests or elimiation of the threat. There are 17 three letter agencies listed in Wikipedia entry for DNI. Couldn`t one of them worked to `take care` of this botnet operator?

> Couldn`t one of them worked to `take care` of this botnet operator?

Unless they want to start a war with Russia, probably not.

Russia, North Korea, Iran, and the other places that harbor cybercrime enterprises rarely agree to extradition.

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