The FBI used phishing and malware to uncover the identity of the criminal

The other day, the Frontier Foundation filed documents on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website, where the agency used illegal methods to reveal the identity of the criminal.

Maybe the agency did not have a choice, but this does not change matters - the employees used malicious software and phishing as the main tools of work. The case itself was the need to catch the man who distributed from his page on MySpace (it was May 2007) the threat to mine the school - Timberline High School.
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As far as can be understood, the FBI refused to disclose the identity of the criminal to MySpace, and the agency employees had to work independently. Someone came up with an interesting move: a page was created that looked like a copy of the popular Seattle Media in the region. And on this page was published an article describing the case itself. Well, and all visitors of the page were loaded with malware, in order to obtain information about the visitor.

As conceived by the FBI, the link to the page was sent to the owner of the account from which the threats were distributed. The account owner (i.e., the criminal) with a high degree of probability could click on the link (after all, the “article” dealt with himself), and when opening the “article” on the criminal's PC, the virus was loaded. Oddly enough, everything went according to plan. The FBI agent sent a message to MySpace account, the owner clicked on the link, and a few days later, on June 14, 2007, he was arrested.

Software from the FBI was named CIPAV, and the program is designed to obtain the IP address, MAC address and information about the last session of the user. By the way, on the EFF website there are 172 pages of a document concerning the use of the FBI's own spyware CIPAV, which was discussed above.

As you can see, justice may not be completely white and fluffy. Maybe, in this case, the end justifies the means, but there is no guarantee that such tools are not used everywhere now.