Dr. Richard Browne:

Most jurisdictions either have or are working on legislation to allow them to do that. That would allow the NCSC to go directly to victims and say to them,"Here is your very specific problem." Up to this point there was something called a botnet, a robot network. These are often very large collections of compromised devices. Some of these devices are things such as home routers, the digital video recorder that sits under a television, a security camera or whatever. Those devices are often joined together in a botnet on a global basis which can be used then for all kinds of malicious activities. The so-called Mirai botnet was responsible for a substantial Internet outage on the east coast of the United States two or three years ago. These botnets are mainly a nuisance but sometimes they are very serious. Our ability to police the national IP address base and have those removed is really important.