How to Own the Internet In Your Spare Time

xenofile writes "A chilling paper has recently been posted analyzing the various threats worms pose to the Internet, and the relative ease of exploiting say the 30,000,000 Kazaa hosts to completely cripple large portions of the net." Lots of good stuff in this paper. It sorta combines many things you've probably read, and demonstrates how the net could be seriously taken by someone who wants it.

Comments

Own the Internet like a Supervillian

[Navius Eurisko]

Want to be a Supervillian?

Don't have the body to fit in a costume?

Too out of shape to battle Superheros all over Champion City?

Think being a Supervillian is out of your reach?

Not anymore! Just like millions of other americans, the Internet has changed lives. Let it do the same...for YOU! With the "Rule the Internet like an Evil Overlord" plan, you can learn how to take advantage of this exciting new medium to spread choas and terror into the people the world around! Now you can work to inspire fear from the comfort of your own home!

Don't worry.

[oever]

It's illegal to distribute virusses. People can go to jail for spreading them. So, why worry. We're safe.

Massively parallel password cracking platform

[Subcarrier]

Very nice paper from Paxson.

On angle he neglects to mention is that the worm could only be the first wave of attack. The machines rapidly infected by a flash virus could easily be transformed into a massively parallel computing platform, into which a seconday attack program could be distributed in a matter of seconds. Such programs could then be used, for instance, to crack entry into strategically important machines that do not exhibit vulnerabilities directly exploitable by the first stage virus.

Scary. I've been wondering why someone hasn't done it yet.

Re:Wow

[SCHecklerX]

You miss the point. If the Internet gets congested with traffic, you will suffer too. Take, for example, the latency spike that occurred last monday around 2:00pm EST as the worm that attacked M$ SQL servers started doing its thing.

Re:actually its based on trust

[RatOmeter]

Yes. And in business, we aren't all that trusting, so we have laws to regulate business behavior in order to improve or, at least, enforce the trustworthiness between business players. Do we need/want the same practices applied to the Internet? I say no, but I have this awful feeling of gloom. I think that, within 10 or 15 years (maybe even less) the business interests in the net will have convinced the lawmakers that we need to boost the trustworthiness of the net... by regulating the hell out of it.

I think we, as the techical force behind the net, can and must resolve the major issues that make the businesses nervous. If they can trundle blithely forward, enjoying the net without too many major hitches, they'll continue to pay our salaries and let us run it. One or two major exploits or outages with mega/giga dollar associated losses, and the lawmakers will clamp right down. Bye bye net, as we know (and love) it.

Re:Masters of the obvious

[matrix29]

Almost any mathematical theory works if you 'ignore' certain variables.

Physicists have been doing this for a long time.

I'm a theoretical physicist, at least I think I am. I cannot be certain. It is just a theory I have.