Air Force Colonel Wants Friendly Botnet
When you hear of spam or cyber attacks taking place, you can bet your bottom dollar that a botnet is at the bottom of it. Simply put, a botnet is a collection of computers – totally unaware of their involvement – being enslaved to do the bidding of someone. From there these zombie computers are able to send out masses of email or target servers and websites with masses of internet traffic.
Many believe that there exists a botnet so big that it could be infected on anywhere between 1 million and 50 million computers.
Now, a US Air Force colonel is suggesting that the U.S. military build their own botnet, as a variation on the Mutually Assured Destruction theory of nuclear weapons. In other words, if the U.S. military is attacked, so should be whoever is doing the attacking.
“The days of the fortress are gone, even in cyberspace,” wrote Col. Charles Williamson III, staff judge advocate for Air Force Intelligence in the Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. “While America must harden itself in cyberspace, we cannot afford to let adversaries maneuver in that domain uncontested.”
But instead of infecting innocent computers to become their botnets, Williamson is suggesting using computers that the Air Force would normally be throwing away.
Williamson’s suggestion has sparked intense debate in the computer security community. First and foremost on people’s minds is the safety and wisdom of allowing a military organization under governmental control access to a massive botnet such as this.
Allan Paller, the director of research for the SANS Institute, which operates the Internet Storm Center – an early warning system for computer attacks – believes that it would be much easier and safer for the military to coerce internet service providers to shut off traffic from hostile computers, rather than adopt a “carpet bombing” approach.
“To me it’s a silly solution to a problem that has much simpler solutions,” he said in an interview. “What’s wrong with it is that it’s not instantaneous, it’s not precise and it’s not entirely effective. There are defenses you can set up against it - whereas using a precision weapon, like working with the network guys, is pretty wonderful.”
Not surprisingly, there are those who see this idea as a good way to strengthen the United States’ cyber defenses. However given the inaccurate and imprecise nature of botnet attacks, and their inability to actually “defend” against another attack, one would suggest that this is only another game of “who has the biggest penis.”
Another problem to be solved is the fact that hackers do not often allow themselves to be geographically tracked, thus providing for the possibility that wherever the U.S. botnet is targeted, may not actually be the ones attacking. Using a method called I.P. Spoofing hackers are often able to fake their location.
Williamson notes that the botnet shouldn’t be allowed to attack privately owned computers in the U.S. without an official order from the president. This idea sort of presents the picture of a second man carrying a second “football” – the suitcase with nuclear missile launch codes – after the present, and a giant red “botnet” button!
In reality, the U.S. should focus on strengthening their defenses, instead of following a decades old approach that nearly brought the world to nuclear war (Cuban missile crisis anyone?). The simple fact of the matter is, if the US was to retaliate to a botnet attack, the internet across the entire planet would suffer dramatically, because no matter how you swing it, the attack is an increase of internet traffic, thus slowing down all the legitimate traffic.
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you would think that these american colonels would behave a little more secretly when considering these ideas.
Like really, if your wanting to make a womd then you dont go telling everyone