FBI muscles up against hackers with breaches going ‘bananas’

Storage tanks at a Colonial Pipeline Inc facility in Avenel, New Jersey, US. With hackers coming after gas pipelines, food production and the water supply, bureaucratic bottlenecks are now unlikely to hinder federal agents proposing aggressive measures to defend US critical networks, said Patel. — Bloomberg

For the last several years, FBI agents debated turning the tables on hackers by remotely accessing breached computer networks and booting out the attackers caught in mid-hack.

They got their chance earlier this year after state-backed Chinese hackers compromised thousands of private Microsoft Exchange email servers. In response, an FBI special agent petitioned a Houston federal judge on April 9 for authorisation to remotely access hundreds of hacking victims’ computer networks and block the attackers’ digital points of entry.