Current Events
<Badtrans seems to be similar to an FBI project dubbed Magic Lantern, a new "spy virus" first revealed in news reports by MSNBC on Nov. 20 (see "Wartime Profiteers of the Digital Age," page 22). Magic Lantern, reportedly, can record every keystroke a suspect makes and then transmit the information – e-mail messages, passwords, what Web sites the suspect has visited, etc. – back to the bureau. The Badtrans worm is "almost exactly like Magic Lantern," security consultant and software designer Jesse Burns says. Like Magic Lantern, Badtrans logs keystrokes and funnels the data back to the worm's creator. In this case the info was routed to 22 e-mail addresses, mostly free Yahoo! and Excite accounts. Experts at tech security firm Symantec labeled Badtrans a worst-case hacker attack – a level-four threat – and quickly posted an antidote to the virus. The massive flow of Badtrans bytes to Rucker Jr.'s servers caught the eye of the FBI's computer crimes unit, and on Dec. 3 an agent gave him a ring. "I helped them with some information," Rucker Jr. says. "I gave them information I thought might be pertinent to catching the people who were victimizing my server." But the bureau wanted something else. "They asked me if I could store the data harvested by the worm for them and burn it on a CD-ROM," he says. Rucker Jr. balked. "The data I have is juicy. It's good for Big Brother surveillance, but it's not going to help them solve their case." So he stalled, telling the agents to mail a written request for the material.
