Air Force Brass Suggests Carpet Bombing the Internet with BotNet vs. Bot-Net   5/13/2008 - 628 views,

Thus Williamson is advocating what he calls “Carpet bombing in cyberspace” (yes, really) or, essentially, countering botnet attacks on U.S. military computers with an even bigger, government-controlled bot-net.

Government and military computers in the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Kyrgyztan and India have all recently come under attack from hackers and zombie machines launching massive distributed denials of service (DDoS). The open, decentralized, fault-tolerant and largely unregulated and loosely controlled nature of the Internet does exhibit some weakness when it comes to preventing cyberattackers from entering the traffic stream. Indeed, a recent estimate puts the DDoS load on the Internet as about 3%, peaking at 5%. Compare this with email, which makes up about 1% to 1.5% of Internet traffic.

Colonel Williamson’s idea is to turn this weakness into a US advantage by building a massive botnet, a collection of distributed computers able to generate an enormous amount of Internet traffic targeted at those computers that first attack the US. Bot-nets are often used by spammers and other online criminals, who surreptitiously infect the insecure computers of naive users with zombies and other malicious software; Chinese criminals are believed to have infected 750,000 computers in the US. Colonel Williamson would build his bot-net out of the thousands of computers that the US military would normally discard every year, and link them to the current high-speed intrusion detection systems, to ensure that any attempted attack would be quickly and overwhelmingly counter-attacked.

Would it work? Probably. But a sustained counter-attack with sufficient traffic to overwhelm cyberenemies would consume huge bandwidth and limit the ability of ordinary Internet users to go about their business, in the US and around the world. Indeed, the need to explain to an allied government why computers in their country were “reduced to hunks of metal and plastic” shows why the biggest challenge will be political in nature.

Colonel Williamson believes that the US is not starting an arms race, but, rather, that “We are in one, and we are losing.” This is, though, an idea that would promote mutually assured destruction of the Internet’s utility.