US Planning Response To a Cyber Attack

We've all heard of Google bombing; the US Government may be taking the expression rather literally. Planning is now underway across the government for the proper way to respond to a cyber attack, and options on the table include launching a cyber counterattack or even bombing the attack's source. The article makes clear that no settled plan is in place, and quotes one spokesman as saying "the preferred route would be warning the source to shut down the attack before a military response." That's assuming the source could be found. From the article: "If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nations critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source."

Comments

Bombs? That's ok...

[Black Parrot]

I didn't want those zombied servers anyway.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

A few bombings ought to move people off Windows.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[anagama]

Finally a reason (aside from erroneous child porn prosecution) to do something about all those compromised machines. If people thought the police might bust down their door to stop their computer from doing illegal things, they might think about being more responsible. Considering the damage an unattended compromised pc can do, it really is surprising that people don't face liability. If you keep a dangerous instrumentality on your property, and it causes damage to others, you are liable for that if the harm is foreseeable. Considering how the news has been peppered with these stories about compromised pcs causing people problems(*), the harm is now foreseeable.

(*) A total non-geek person I know brought up that AZ child porn case to me in conversation and mentioned she thinks her machine is probably compromised too.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[paeanblack]

If you keep a dangerous instrumentality on your property, and it causes damage to others, you are liable for that if the harm is foreseeable.

That is only true if all responsible parties are held to a reasonable level of accountability.

If you found out that your oven was, without your knowledge, part of a local arson ring, you'd be pretty upset a being held accountable for the neighborhood damages. You'd probably blame Kenmore for making such a thing remotely possibly in the first place, since it has no connection with how or why you bought the oven in the first place.

Until the hardware mfgrs, OS mfgrs, software mfgrs, and users are all held to roughly similar standards, you can't place all blame on the user.

To put things a different way:
-If 1% of your products cause widespread damage, then 1% of your users are idiots.
-If 5% of your products cause widespread damage, then 5% of your users need training.
-If 25% of your products cause widespread damage, then you are the idiot.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[Alligator427]

Along the same lines, it has always irked me that (the government) has never considered approaching Microsoft about the severe security flaws to which it's software is subject. Certainly if the most popular operating system in the world were less morbidly insecure, botnets and the like but be far fewer between. After all, these botnets aren't being built out of *NIX machines, so we're really talking about MS software.

I think a certain amount of responsibility lies on the endusers shoulders insofar as they should be expected not to compromise their own machines, but when you get your brand new windows PC it is vulnerable out of the box. It seems to me like microsoft is selling a consumer product that represents a great potential for illegal/malignant misuse, that most consumers are largely unaware of beyond "If I don't install virus-protection software I will get adware on my machine".

I've always found it wildly absurd that no real authority has ever stepped up to microsoft and made them do something about the woeful state of their OS in terms of security. It seems like one of the best responses that we could have to such attacks it to force Microsoft to mend its ways, if at all possible. If not, at the very least, produce some kind of government-issued label as used in cigarrete boxes to indicate to the consumer that "this product is wildly insecure and if you use it, small children will vomit on your shoes". At least in that case you could pass some of the responsibility on the end user.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[flyingfsck]

A Class Action lawsuit about knowingly selling defective goods, would certainly be a good idea and would be just as truly American a solution as bombing all houses with compromized Windows PCs...

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[StikyPad]

True, but if 100% of your products cause widespread damage, you get a seat at the UN Security Council.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[cryocide]

Your scenario is a little off, since your oven can't walk out of the house and burn someone else's house down. Let's try a more realistic scenario.

You buy a new drive-by-wire car. Then either of the following happens: You forego the option to park your car in a readily-available garage and a terrorist quietly breaks into it, or you simply take the car to a garage that you thought was reputable because of its professional-looking store front but was in fact a terrorist-run shop. Either way, they had their way with your car, installing hidden remote controls on the drive-by-wire system. Then they install a bomb using any available space, such as the empty body panels, inside the seats, etc. They can now damage or destroy any bridge they like, but you never knew what they did to your car, so you went on with life as usual. Then they did it to other owners' cars around town that were similarly vulnerable to compromise or social engineering.

Now for the best-case-scenario version of the outcome. We'll assume that the bridge is unoccupied, so there is no human life lost when they take your car and all the other zombie cars on their final joy ride, but the bridge is damaged and has to be closed while its structural integrity is assessed. Meanwhile, traffic has to be rerouted or stopped altogether. People can't get to work. Goods can't be delivered. The general population is afraid that there will be another attack, possibly trapping them in their neighborhood.

Now imagine that the cars were your computer and all the other zombie machines out there, the home garage was a simple NAT router or decent software firewall or the repair shop was a software package that contained malware, and the bridge was any major server or router that a decent-sized portion of the internet population relies on for day-to-day electronic transactions.

Do you really think it was the car manufacturer's fault that you left the car unprotected, or worse, you handed the keys to an untrustworthy mechanic because he had a professional-looking shop? While I don't think the car's owner should be held criminally responsible, I think they unknowingly forfeited the car when they ignored their responsibility to keep it reasonably secure. Don't be surprised if the government starts fragging driverless cars once they've identified them.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[JonathanR]

People with Aero Glass Windows shouldn't throw...

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[c6gunner]

Well, for one thing, prosecuting every single person whose computer has been infected with a trojan would pretty much bankrupt the US, and put most of your population, including all of your politicians, in Jail. Might not be such a bad thing, really...

Anyway, it'd be pointless to prosecute these people is because the vast majority of compromised machines aren't even IN any western nation. Every script kiddie knows that if you really want a bot-net, you scan Asian IP's. When I was 15 I had 2,400 Korean computers running seti@home :) I don't think there's a single computer in that whole country that isn't infected with something.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[tsm_sf]

Your scenario is a little off, since your oven can't walk out of the house and burn someone else's house down. Let's try a more realistic scenario.

You buy a new drive-by-wire car.

You can tell right there it's going to be a good analogy.

Re:Bombs? That's ok...

[CmdrGravy]

throttle by wire is common Indeed, I believe it's know as garrotting.

botnet

[TheSHAD0W]

I wonder what their response would be to the attack of a botnet. Carpet bombing, maybe?

Re:botnet

[Cyberax]

Nuclear arms, of course :) The ultimate solution for spam and cyberattacks.

Re: botnet

[Black Parrot]

> I wonder what their response would be to the attack of a botnet.

Good thing the story isn't on a DoD site, or Slashdot might get some retaliatory cruise missiles.

Re:botnet

[Nasarius]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#The_ARPANET_a nd_nuclear_attacks really. But rather than a "cyber attack", I'd be much more concerned about a fairly easy, inexpensive coordinated attack on the physical network infrastructure.

Re:botnet

[mrbluze]

Depending on the location of the computers, it might be a carpet bomb, or a bunker buster if it's a teenager's PC in a basement somewhere, or if they run on expensive computers running *nix, a cluster bomb, or if it's a server farm, they might use napalm with agent orange...

Re:botnet

[mrbluze]

.. or a nude bomb if the attacker is spreading porn, or a great big armoured bulldozer to dig up a worm attack, or a bunch of soldiers with spears and shiny metal shields and stuff if it's a Trojan, or a firetruck if the enemy runs a firewall...

Re:botnet

[Shihar]

You joke, but I think people are missing the fact that bombs can stop many attacks. If for instance a nation was able to launch some massive attack that was crippling the Internet, in this world of zombied computers can't simply block everything. A true Internet crashing attack would take hundreds (thousands?) of people to pull off and you likely might be able to at least localize them to a single nation. If you felt that that nation state was directly responsible, you might very well decide to bomb an entire nation's infrastructure to the point where no one has Internet access.

The level of destruction on a nations infrastructure you would have to inflict would be horrific, but it might very well be justified. Taking out the Internet for the US, Europe, and some of Asia is just as bad as physically blowing up their power plants and cutting power. Such nations would be entirely justified to respond as if a foreign air force was bombing their infrastructure and respond in kind.

All of that said, I am a skeptic that anyone could do more then make the Internet hiccup for a few minutes before proper defenses got things running relatively smoothly again. The Internet is a pretty robust system. It will take more then a Windows Vista upgrade to make the Internet unsecured enough to be taken down.

Re:botnet

[Hoi Polloi]

This is why I make sure all of my zombie systems are physically located in US government facilities.

An option...

[yourexhalekiss]

That's an option that the Feds have that the average whitehat doesn't: calling in airstrikes against the DOSer.

Military action is unlikely to be a solution

[Space cowboy]

In the event of a massive cyberattack against the country that was perceived as originating from a foreign source, the United States would consider launching a counterattack or bombing the source of the cyberattack, Hall said. But he noted the preferred route would be warning the source to shut down the attack before a military response

There's a lot wrong with this. Off the top of my head...

Any sustained attack on network infrastructure, on the scale that they're talking about, is almost certainly going to be a distributed attack. Botnets have no patriotic allegiance, their locality is a function of machine vulnerability (eg: N. Korea's dependence on Active-X), not politics.

If I'm crafting an attack, I don't have to even tell the truth about my IP address, TCP allows the sender to specify a (fake) IP address. Obviously I won't get any replies, but I don't care if I'm simply out to cause damage

Geolocation of IP addresses is pretty much a black art as well - there's far too much variability by IP address to try and localise to the precision needed for bombing the source. My hostip.infowebsite only attempted to locate to the /24 netblock, and even then only managed ~50% accuracy.

Not to mention that it's a pretty big precedent to set... At least they're talking about talking, before bombing; the problem is that if you make a threat to bomb someone, you have to be prepared to carry it out. Countries can't afford to be seen to be bluffing when it comes to things like this, the impact on future negotiations is too high.

Simon.

Re:Military action is unlikely to be a solution

[CRCulver]

Botnets have no patriotic allegiance, their locality is a function of machine vulnerability (eg: N. Korea's dependence on Active-X), not politics.

South Korea has a problem with banks etc. relying on Active X. North Korea has little computer use to speak of.

Re:Military action is unlikely to be a solution

[thePsychologist]

Let's also not forget that the general public understands much less about a cyberattack than a good ol' fashioned physical attack. Hence, it's much easier for the government to tell the public that they were in severe danger because "the internet was in danger" or whatever obfuscationt they'll use, when in reality they were pinged fifty more times than average. This is really just another reason to take out the guns, and we all know they're having a difficult time justifying military action these days.

Re:Military action is unlikely to be a solution

[Miseph]

What you're forgetting is that WE have blackhats too. The idea isn't to stop the botnet, because we can't do that nearly as fast as 'they" can open up a new one... if we could, botnets wouldn't be a problem in the first place. I think the idea is that if a botnet/virus/whatever is used to "attack the internet" (a notion that I believe to be intentionally broad, much like "attack the country", not necesarily to justify doing whatever we want, but so that we aren't pigeonholed by a narrow definition), then we are going to "attack", with whatever force and technique seems most reasonable (ie. we don't drop bombs on the homes of bank robbers, nor do we send a couple of uniforms armed only with 9mm pistols and handcuffs to arrest government sponsored death squads) the people behind it. If that means back hacking, packet tracing, following convoluted money trails, reverse engineering, traffic analysis, or whatever else we can think of to find the person(s) responsible, then so be it.

Military action might be unlikely if the attacker is, say, a 15 year old kid writing trojans that let him simultaneously crash hundreds of major network hubs as some sort of "practical joke", because once found they would probably just arrest the kid and give him 20 years in federal "pound me in the ass" prison. If, on the other hand, the same thing were done by a team of Chinese black hats for the purpose of undermining our infrastructure in the moments before launching a surprise attack on Taiwan and the US fleet protecting it, a SWAT team is going to be in a little over their heads.

spoof

[brenddie]

So if we can spoof enough IP's we can get the USA to bomb any country of our choosing.... interesting.

Re:spoof

[ghstomahawks]

What about a certain ranch in Texas ....?

Re:spoof

[flyingfsck]

The ultimate Shashdot effect - route the next article link through a Washington DC address...

denial of service

[oohshiny]

Well, this has some great potential for denial of service attacks by forging the source of a cyber attack.

Re:denial of service

[TubeSteak]

Well, this has some great potential for denial of service attacks by forging the source of a cyber attack.

The practical joker in me can't wait until someone forges an attack using the WhiteHouse.gov IP.

OTOH, I suspect that the NSA & DoD aren't that stupid

Re:denial of service

[r_jensen11]

Odds are they'd fuck up and use whitehouse.com instead....

tilte confusing, google has nothing to do with it.

[deft]

At first I thought the US government might be using it's PageRank power to make terms like "nuclear threat" bring up URL's like iran.gov (or whatever their whitehouse.gov correlary might be). In fact it was just a weak attempt to use the word bombing twice and mislead.

Instead, the US is just aknowledging that attacks on it's internet infrastructure can be responded to just like physical attacks.... by military attack.

Is anyone suprised that if one place was pinpointed as the source of the attack on any countries infrastructure it might be a target? I'm not. The net is more important than some buildings at this point.

The only thing I'm suprised is to expect any attack to be from one place... I'd expect it to be distributed. But thats ok, we have bombs for that too. ouch.

Uhh... woudln't just be easier...

[thestudio_bob]

Uhh... woudln't just be easier to bomb the source. It's not like we don't know where Micro$ofts head quarters are.

Re:Uhh... woudln't just be easier...

[Kalriath]

Uhh... woudln't just be easier to bomb the source. It's not like we don't know where Micro$ofts head quarters are. I am so sick of hearing this type of crap that Microsoft (what, you can't spell "s"?) is responsible for every single piece of botnet or exploit on the internet. You know, Linux/Unix machines can be "rooted" as well - to the same or more devastating effect...

However, like with /([A-Za-z]?)nix/, Windows can be quite secure in the hands of one who knows what they're doing. In my 10 years of using Windows, I've never had a virus or trojan infect a machine under my direct control. Any virus would fail to pass the ISA Firewall (yes, that's MICROSOFT's Firewall software) as the antivirus (granted, third party) would block it from being retransmitted to the requesting machine. Client machines are on a completely seperate subnet behind a Sonicwall firewall (though even a cheapo device can achieve this same result), and outbound SMTP is allowed ONLY to the Mail Exchanger on the other side of the firewall. This setup is not really all THAT hard to do... if you wanted to save money you'd swap the ISA for a Fedora/Debian/Ubuntu/Insert Distribution Here (Solaris?) machine with maybe Squid or something, but the net effect is the same - the client machines are SAFE.

Re:Easy response...

[jmauro]

Won't work if the pipe you're trying to use is flooded with useless data, since you're not actually stopping the attack at the source and your bandwidth is limited. You've only prevent them from getting into your network, not actually stopping the DOS which is kind of the point.

Instead of physical bombing

[gravesb]

I would rather see cyber counter attacks. Yes, a lot of the targets would be innocent bots, but the counter attack could be as simple as taking them off line. If you remove enough bots, the attackers either have to give up, or begin to use bots closer to their own computers, until eventually they would have to use their own computers. Taking that many computers off line through cyber attacks is not something to be undertaken lightly, but if the incoming attack is sufficient to have a significant negative impact on infrastructure, then its probably justified. And maybe, if we start having massive cyber battles that this seems to imply, maybe Joe Public will stop clicking install this now banner ads and allowing his computer to become a bot. But probably not.

Slashdotted:No more submissions to .gov/mil sites

[NZheretic]

To Commander "Taco"
Please cease and desist linking to site xxx.mil ( reacted ) or whitehouse.gov or else we will bomb you.

Signed G.W. Bush.

Re: Bring 'Em On

[Black Parrot]

> I can't wait for Bush and his Pentagon to protect us from cyberwar. After all, the Bush doctrine of using one attack on us to justify attacking someone who hadn't attacked us, distracting us from the original attacker, is really paying off.

Hey, current thought among the Bush administration and the neocon "thinkers" that got us in to all this, is that if you blow one war you should start another one so you can try again.

Scene from the War Room

[mbstone]

General, the bombers are ready to go and the cruise missiles are fully fueled. And our intel group has pinpointed the source of the attack. It's coming from 127.0.0.1 .

Re:It doesn't matter where the attack in terms of

[Anonymous Coward]

No, North Korea won't get bombed. They have got nuclear weapons, but they haven't got any oil.

You can be quite sure, even now before the attack has started, that the intelligence will point to Iran being responsible. In fact, it is most likely that Iran will be have to be bombed before the cyber attack starts, in order to preempt it

Attack the source?

[bizitch]

.... well you can kiss Redmond, WA goodbye ;)

But what if...

[OriginalArlen]

...the network fights back? Huh? D'ye ever think of that? And then it'll launch all the old ICBMs, oh yes, and then androids will stalk the smoking ruins hunting down and shooting the last holdout remnants of the Republican Party.

I think....

[Derek Loev]

I think that we're all reading too much into this. The article is basically saying that if somebody is going to attack the US in a way that would be damaging to the country that US is prepared to retaliate...by any means necessary.
I'm not sure if I agree with everything in the article but it is the Government's job to protect this country and there are a lot of businesses and people that demand on the internet. If some outside source could mess with this it would be devastating to the economy and the country...

Redefines...

[DimGeo]

... Internet Exploder... Click that link and you and your entire fraking town are history.

I see it now

[aschoeff]

Both the RIAA and the MPAA manage to insert sufficient language into some unrelated bill (ala what they tried with the Patriot Act) that authorizes preemptive strikes against p2p networks, saying that they could serve as massive distributed attack vectors against our nation's cyber-infrastructure.

Flip forward a few weeks. I wake up on a typical Sunday like today and start up Azureus. Within a couple of minutes, a tomahawk cruise missile is launched from a regional military installation.

The upside of my imminent demise is my last minutes will be spent mellowly and obliviously perusing mininova, seeing if anyone uploaded a torrent for that one episode of The Daily Show I missed last Thursday.

If only I had stayed up past 10PM that night, I would never have brought this on myself.

oh really - this is just hilarious

[toby]

When you're a country with a hammer, everything looks like a snowglobe, eh?

What a way to dispel a myth...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well some of the world thinks your a crazed bunch of war mongers, but this story, erm, never mind...

What do you bet we'll get stories about Cyber attacks from Iran. This sounds like a war machine trying to make another war, since the last ones not going so well.

Re:What a way to dispel a myth...

[Andrewkov]

This sounds like a war machine trying to make another war, since the last ones not going so well.

Oh crap, it sounds like they are planning to attack Canada!

Re:Hell Yeah

[EGSonikku]

I have a magical stone that protects me from tiger attacks. I have been using it for years and not one attack!

This proves it works.

Re:Hell Yeah

[Doc Ruby]

The real way to look at it is that there was a successful terrorist attack a year into Bush's responsibility. And since then, Bush has achieved so many more terrorist goals than any little terrorist could on their own that there's little need. Including killing thousands more Americans, destroying our military, bankrupting our treasury and our morals. And most especially destroying our freedoms and sense of security by sowing massive terror every time Bush shows his face in public.

If there had been another planebomb, you'd use that to justify Bush getting even tougher. Just like you're surely cheerleading Bush's current escalation in Iraq. You zombie Republicans are so predictable.

No one believes that gibberish about fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here. Except maybe you, Anonymous Dick Cheney Coward.

Re:It doesn't matter where the attack in terms of

[Poppler]

I think we may have learned not to trust the "intelligence" coming out of this administration

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

NY Times - U.S. Presents Evidence of Iranian Weapons in Iraq

The article does mention that the claims about Iran "[are] bound to generate skepticism among those suspicious that the Bush administration is trying to find a scapegoat for its problems in Iraq and, some political analysts and White House critics believe, is looking for an excuse to attack Iran." Beyond that, it appears to be the same sort of echoing of administration propaganda (conveyed by unnamed intelligence officials) that we saw in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

re:

[Kynmore]

It sounds like something from a William Gibson novel. Only difference is our government isn't a corporation.

Don't you think that's overkill for MS users?

[cheros]

I mean, not every end user chooses to be infected, and it's not like it's easy to get a machine secured whilst online before it gets infected. I'm not quite sure that a warhead on the house is the best way to deal with a part of a botnet.

If you really want to take about liability you'll have to start with a company that sells you a car without brakes, thus creating a huge market for brakes, and is now starting to supply the brakes themselves. Whilst still leaving them out of the original car.

Replace car with "Windows" and brakes with "decent security" and all of a sudden they're wonderful and creating shareholder value and carry no liability for their actions whatsoever whilst charging to the hilt for the privilege. Maybe taking decent action against them may help - it's going to be cheaper than bombs unless some White House friends are in need of tax funds again and need some rebuilding projects to camouflage the handouts.

Yes, I'm a cynic. Live with it.

How about take zombies offline?

[doormat]

Work with ISPs in the US, Canada and Europe to take zombied computers offline. They'll get a letter or phone call telling them that their computer was part of a zombie network that was attacking DHS or whoever, and that they wont be allowed back online until their computer is cleaned. Most people only have one choice for broadband (DSL or Cable), and they'll have to go back to dialup (where they wont be much of a threat in terms of dDOS) if they dont get their act together.

Its like when a cop pulls you over for having an unsafe vehicle, its about time that ISPs start patrolling their userbase and send letters/call their users to notify them of their infection.

Standard hacker defences won't work

[flyingfsck]

If the Feds launch a B52, then I think a tin foil hat ain't gonna help. Even an asbestos suit won't help much.

Re:Standard hacker defences won't work

[maxwell demon]

Destroying a country will get quite easy. All you have to do is to route a massive attack on US infrastructure through Tor exit nodes in that country. The US military will then finish the job for you.

How about this?

[Spy der Mann]

Instead of dropping nukes, drop free, registered copies of Windows Vista. The problem will take care of itself.

Not really...

[nowhere.elysium]

Well yes, it sounds like a Gibson novel, but the *pertinent* difference is that if your governement were a corporation, they'd be a damn sight more accurate at pinpointing and destroying any relevant threats, and they definitely wouldn't be in anywhere near as much debt as they currently are. Plus, they'd use railguns, instead of nukes.