Re:Microsoft Remotely Removed Tor Browser Bundle from more t...
by DangerousPie on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @10:25AM
(#7095774)
Extremely misleading headline.
According to the article all they did was remove some malware that happened to contain Tor. And from the sound of it there was no 'remote kill switch' or anything involved, they just added the malware to their MSE antivirus definitions which subsequently removed it.
Re:Microsoft Remotely Removed Tor Browser Bundle from more t...
by kennu on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @10:27AM
(#7095784)
According to Microsoft's own blog post (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/09/tackling-...), they specifically removed a non-self-updating version of Tor, which was installed by the Sefnit malware. This version of Tor contained a number of security vulnerabilities which would otherwise be left on the victim's computer. They also consulted Tor developers to plan the cleanup.
According to the article all they did was remove some malware that happened to contain Tor. And from the sound of it there was no 'remote kill switch' or anything involved, they just added the malware to their MSE antivirus definitions which subsequently removed it.
Update: Yup, that's what they did. Here is the blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/09/tackling-...
Sensationalist headlines doesn't really work that well on HN.
(Copied my comment over from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7095429)
http://www.zdnet.com/irish-td-attacks-open-source-browsers-a...