Canada’s spy service won permission to hack two state-linked botnets — assessed to likely include China — hiding inside Canadian homes

The Bureau: For the first time, a Federal Court judge has authorized Canada’s intelligence service to hack into privately owned routers, servers and household internet devices across the country and disarm the malicious software that conscripts them into foreign botnets — virtual armies implanted by hostile states to act as trojan horses, attacking critical Canadian infrastructure from within Canadian homes — a power the court itself acknowledged would otherwise be a crime…