Slashdot Mirror
USAF Considers Creation of Military Botnet
sowjetarschbajazzo writes "Air Force Col. Charles W. Williamson III believes that the United States military should maintain its own botnet, both as a deterrent towards those who would attempt to DDoS government networks, and an offensive weapon to be used against the networks of unfriendly nations, criminal groups, or terrorist organizations.
"Some people would fear the possibility of botnet attacks on innocent parties. If the botnet is used in a strictly offensive manner, civilian computers may be attacked, but only if the enemy compels us. The U.S. will perform the same target preparation as for traditional targets and respect the law of armed conflict as Defense Department policy requires by analyzing necessity, proportionality and distinction among military, dual-use or civilian targets. But neither the law of armed conflict nor common sense would allow belligerents to hide behind the skirts of its civilians. If the enemy is using civilian computers in his country so as to cause us harm, then we may attack them." What does Slashdot think of this proposal?"
I'm all for the theory that if you attack us we will defend ourselves. The "you" in that sentence does not matter, in other words, if an ant bites us we step on it, if a dog bites us, we kick it and if an enemy country uses pereonnal computers to attack us, we use botnet.
I'm Surprised that they are not doing this already. That begs the question, who's computers would host the bots? Patriotic Americans who allow the govt to install software on their machine to attack the enemy is all well and good but what happens when the alphabet soup figures out that the govt has software on most of America's PC's?
No good can come of this.
A botnet is like a disease. Not a bomb. Deliberately infecting your own computers is a horrible idea.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Let's see...
It's a military necessity to have a botnet...so it will become my patriotic duty to allow their malware to reside on my machine. AV will be modified to not report it's existence. I will have no control or knowledge of what it's doing, or what it's reporting.
Then, those in charge of the program will complain that the citizen's computers are "unreliable" - they get turned off, are filled with competing malware, etc. So they will let a contract to Grumman or Lockheed for 10 million computers, to be scattered across the country/world as dedicated US Militarty Botnet computers, at, say, 10,000 dollars apiece. Due to specification changes, additional missions, etc., cost ovveruns will push the cost to 100,000 dollars apiece. The Congress will get involved, and will reduce the number of computers to buy to 10,000, will add additional missions and capabilities, and the per-unit cost will climb to $1,000,000. Five years later, the program will be cancelled.
And, still, the government malware will reside on my machine.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Sounds like the Geneva convention needs to be updated to include technological attacks.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
You have 4 windows updates to install:
Security hotfix for XML services KB0453456
Security hotfix for Windows
Microsoft Silverlight
US DoD anti-terrorist cyberwarfare battle attack bot v3.1
Do you think they really wouldn't do it?
One day this botnet will become self-aware...
We must not allow a botnet gap!!
"If the enemy is using civilian computers in his country so as to cause us harm, then we may attack them"
It might be found that the enemy botnet just doesn't respect political borders and will be using machines within ones own country. What happens then?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Somebody needs to correct this! It's even the Air Force, just like in movies.
..is that creating a botnet is a fundamentally offensive tactic. If you're compromising computers to use for "defensive purposes", then you're launching a preemptive attack, which would make the US the aggressor. Unless you think somehow you're going to convince me to put your crappy malware on my machine, in which case you're sadly mistaken.
The U.S. will perform the same target preparation as for traditional targets
I wonder why that doesn't seem the least bit reassuring to me...
So.. Ummm... Does this mean that Microsoft has retroactively become a military "equipment" provider?
:)
Ahhh.. That felt good. Mod away
if China or Iran or some other enemy country wants to attack the USA and the US government wants to start a botnet let me know i have 2 PCs on 24/7/365 on cable broadband, i will volunteer my PCs to work for the US Government as part of a botnet, Bush may not be my favorite president but i am still an American and know what side my bread is buttered on (just make a Linux version too)...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Slashdot: Internet Ranks Vanilla as the Best Ice Cream Flavour Ever
If this goes ahead, I guarantee the next US spammer in court will claim that possession of a botnet is covered by his 2nd Amendment rights.
Incidentally, why doesn't the 2nd Amendment apply to tactical thermonuclear weapons?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Anyone who would trust the US government with its own botnet is insane.
Every day we learn more details of how it has absolutely no problem deceiving the public and generally acting like immoral scum to get what it wants with no repercussions. Take your pick from a very brief list: FBI misuse of NSLs, warrantless wiretapping, politically-motivated firing of career employees, illegal wars of aggression to make rich people richer while lots of poor people on both sides get killed, etc. etc.
And every other day there is another serious incident that brings into question their ability to manage the simplest IT-related tasks, like the laptop thefts and buying chinese knockoff routers infested with who knows what.
So yeah, let's let those immoral morons operate a botnet. That is an excellent idea.
...disease pathogens. Oh wait...
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
No wonder Net Neutrality is such a hot topic. If the military wants this I'm sure they will expect full bandwidth for their bo
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
As another poster stated; Im surprised they are not doing this already. I could see the benefit of this from the military standpoint. Were I a person with the power to make a decision to do such a thing I would have done so a long time ago, as it would infinitely increases my technical capability for reasons previously stated. If they can, they should, use every available method at their disposal within their own infrastructure to gain an advantage.
However, this kind of thing should be limited to only military PCs. If the idea here is to create bots out of ordinary civilian PC's, the results could only be disastrous. It would be susceptible to poisoning and a multitude of other types of attacks. The first thing I thought of after reading this was, Skynet from the Terminator movies.
How will they deal with Linux users? Arrest us for daring to use a non-conformist O/S? Demand that all systems use Windows by a set date (oh, how Bill G. would dance at that one)? It boggles the mind...
Gun control: all the rounds in the X-ring.
... If the enemy is using civilian computers in his country so as to cause us harm, then we may attack them. So... if the enemy is using civilian computers in our country... will the USAF still take them out?What if these computers (in our country or another, third country) are running critical infrastructure? Or are essential to a hospital, school, or business?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
...would it be illegal to take anti-botnet measures, such as running rootkit revealer on your own machine and wiping the infection? Or would that get you swimming lessons at Gitmo?
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
... the government decides to turn this botnet against the civilian population in some way?
I mean, at some point (if I recall correctly, I am not American, I am Canadian), there were laws created saying that Americans have the right to arm themselves in case their government turns against them. Does that include the case of computer warfare?
What would happen in the case of other countries that this botnet could be used against? Would that be considered an act of war?
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
The one where the superior military, that could crush its opposition anywhere they stood and fought, couldn't defeat an army that kept slipping in to the countryside?
The one where the "evil" greater power could be demonised every time they caused collateral damage or took reprisals on the people the weaker force hid behind?
The one where the great general George Washington brilliantly used geurilla tactics to make up for never having more than 17,000 men in the field at any one time?
The one where, soon after winning its largely guerilla war, they wrote the second ammendment to their constitution to enshrine the right to that kind of combat?
The one where the larger but distant power regarded the attacks on its own holdings as terrorism - the term just wasn't widely used yet?
It's ironic that a nation formed on, and celebrating in its constitution, the principles of armed insurrection, guerilla warfare and terrorism when it was the weaker power gets its panties in such a collective bunch when people do exactly the same thing that worked so well for it back again.
Remember: If you win and you're powerful enough to write the history, it's noble. If you lose, it's evil terrorism. Until it's decided, which one it's viewed as simply depends on which side you're on.
The Metagovernment project is replacing traditional governments with a DRCS. No botnets necessary.
Just infect the computers of enemy governments...that should bear the brunt of it.
... that the only way to fight a network is with another network. Do they really have any other choice?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
is it "belligerents"? Does that mean American citizens who are unhappy with the present state of things or current administration? Members of a certain political party? How do you differentiate between a real enemy and someone who accidentally fits the profile? How do you control abuse of this?
Given their track record, once the botnet comes online I give them three months tops before someone else hijacks it and uses it to drop US gov't websites just to show them it can be done. Watch as they scramble to bring even more offensive capabilities online in response to the demonstration.
Hahaha... welcome to the digital cold war.
In a traditional war, the idea is that the US could win by having a larger, better equipped and high tech army. Of course, it doesn't always work in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, but that's the theory.
On the internet, small groups of individuals can wield as much power as the US armed forces could hope to. Massive botnets are hardly new.
Also, how exactly would targeting infected civilian PCs help? The first 'D' in DDOS stands for "distributed", i.e. blasting PCs off the internet one at a time isn't going to help much.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
much?
I don't seem to have much sympathy for people who's computers have been compromised any more than I have sympathy for drunk or reckless drivers who get into car accidents.
It would be nice if the response would be to either remotely eradicate botnets through antivirus or other "friendly" measures, and at least it would be nice if the response gave the user some clue why their computer no longer works. Something like a blue screen with the message "your computer was compromised and was part of botnet [insert identifier here]. You must re-install your operating system to fix this problem" would be the least I'd hope for...
As for starting their own military botnet... That seems to be FUD. They're talking mostly about taking down adversary botnets both at the server and client levels, which means taking down individual computers that have been compromised.
I think you would be nuts to bother with old hardware.
You can probably make simple TCP/IP devices for less than $5-10 a piece that would consume hardly any power. Embedded, low-power, low-footprint devices, which you can mass-produce.
Not sure how you manage to distribute these around the internet though - I expect this is where most of the cost would lie.
Even if true, the assurance that all the usual standards will be upheld in choosing targets to attack just isn't all that reassuring. Building a botnet means attacking systems. Lots and lots of them. In order to be effective, a botnet has to be widely distributed and scattered amidst legitimate systems, otherwise you can just ignore it. Building a botnet would mean compromising a metric fuckload(possibly an imperial fuckload, depending on the department and contractor in question) of individual and business machines. Using domestic computers for this purpose had better be illegal, and even if it isn't, tolerating vulnerabilities in domestic systems just to build a botnet is lousy security policy. I suspect that our allies would not be happy to hear about us trying it on their citizens and our enemies might well raise a serious diplomatic stink about it.
Knowing us, of course, we'll probably take the even less palatable option and hire scummy contractors and subcontractors to do it. How could a DoD/Raytheon/Ukrainian Mob joint venture with a giant black budget possibly go wrong?
This is stupid, and appears to be illegal. It is outright malicious and a bluntly obvious invasion of privacy. I'll dig up some research for you if you want, but do I really need to?
Did Microsoft put you up to this?
A botnet succeeds in DDOS because it's able to leverage the bandwidth of 10's or 100's of ISPs to overwhelm the resources of the 1 ISP or server that a site is hosted on.
For a US Military operation, you wouldn't bring the headache of maintaining 1,000,000 crappy old PCs stuffed in unused closets to bear on the problem. You'd build big machines, and you'd locate them on major backbone networks. When it came time to bring a little DDOS to bear on the enemy, you would have your big machine fire packets. It could spoof IP addresses as it wished; it could use yours, and you wouldn't even know it!
No one other than the technicians on the backbone could tell the difference between this and a hacker's botnet. But it would at the same time be much larger scale, cost more, and be theoretically more efficient - all positives in the military contracting arena.
And the worms ate into his brain.
We could build a voluntary enrollment bot net that could be loaned to the government in time of crisis. Other times we could use it for basic research or rent it out for LEGAL super computer use.
It might also come in handy for keeping our own government under our control in case some over zealous patriot gets their hands on the military's control equipment.
what this push for "America's Army" was all about.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
How long would it take to design and deploy something like this as a government driven project. Maybe if they would write it in Ada....
This is absolutely the definition of a weapon of mass destruction.
"If the botnet is used in a strictly offensive manner, civilian computers may be attacked, but only if the enemy compels us."
In other words, there will be massive civilian collateral damage that we can't control. It's the electronic equivalent of nuclear, chemical, or biological warfare. How wonderful.
Bill Joy's excellent (albeit dystopian) article "Why the future doesn't need us" talked about this. He said "Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication." He also pointed out that unlike NBC warfare, the tools required for KMD aren't large, expensive, or hard to get. You need a plant to build a nuclear bomb. You need a good lab to create chemical or biological weapons. You need a cheap computer and a minor internet connection to create a knowledge-based weapon, i.e. a botnet.
It's crap. The international community needs to get together and stop this nonsense before they 'try it out' a few times. With strong international laws and buy-in, they'd also have a better chance at fighting the Russian crime gangs responsible for the existing botnets.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It seems like the author wants to run a legal botnot from military computers around the world, as a way to respond to attacks. That's fine, but since criminal botnets are distributed among computers around the world, some of the attacking computers will be from allied countries. Heck, some of them may be the very same military computers that are part of our botnet. The author writes about attackers spoofing IPs to appear to come from friendlies, but what if the computer is actually a friendly that has been zombied? That's where other "intelligence" sources comes in, I suppose, but I am skeptical that the attacker could be accurately identified quickly enough.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Army and Navy will want botnets too! Seriously, cyber warfare will be a big issue of two high-tech countries ever go to war against each other again... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Wouldn't this be rather useless when all of those bots are behind only one of the fifty government gateways? Can you say bottleneck? http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/1217259
How will they ensure that they're only enlisting US-based computers?
The geo-location algorithms are only so accurate.
Chip H.
Next up: USAID -- the United States Agency for International Development -- will begin funding for Internet cafes in developing countries. "Really, we are only trying to advance their economic and technological potential!"
Hmm... can you install a bot zombie on an OLPC?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Wouldn't it just be easier to install this sort of thing directly at outgoing US cables? Instead of pumping a bunch of crap across the domestic lines, why not just spew it at the border?
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Did you know that they really don't protect civilians under "contemporary" conditions ? It specifically states that if "the enemy" (anyone whom you're at war with) does not clearly identify itself (which is defined to mean military bases OUTSIDE of population centers and CLEARLY uniformed troops) that civilians, enemy troops AND casualties are fair game ?
As in, if there is a faction using people as human shields, any army fighting them is completely within their rights to shoot all the human shields first. (think about what rights this theoretically gives Israel in fighting Gaza, they go above and beyond what Geneva requires of them, since a genocide in Gaza would be clearly within Israel's rights under the Geneva conventions)
Even in an open war a military is completely within their rights to let a civilian population starve. Everything except direct, unprovoked attacks is not the subject of the Geneva conventions.
The convention also CLEARLY states who gets to judge (obviously without possibility of appeal) whether the provisions of the Geneva conventions allow you to shoot a certain person : the field commander. His decision is final, and he gets to be judge, jury and executioner.
Besides, there isn't a single warring faction in the world today, except the United States (and Israel, Turkey and "maybe" China (insofar you call Tibet a war, besides I doubt you will find China respecting Geneva in Africa)), that even pretend to respect the Geneva conventions. E.g. hezbollah has declared upon multiple occasions that it doesn't, nor does it ever intend to (and then they say something about some prophet not respecting them as justification).
Lots of other warring parties don't respect Geneva : the islamist government of Sudan, Egypt (in it's south), Iran, Pakistan,
Never mind civilian computers being fair game. These conventions date from immediately after WWII (not that anyone really thinks Hitler would have respected them if they existed, in fact he would probably have used them to his advantage, but hey, one can hope, right ?)
Also let's not forget, article 29(3) of the Human Rights :
"(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."
In other words, anyone attempting to abolish the human rights treaty (one obvious party would be islamists) does not have any human rights.
In practice you will find provisions like that in just about any constitution, in constitutions as varied as both the US constitution and the Iranian one (you know the one that requires the state to execute gays).
why a botnet? surely people here and the people incharge realise that a "botnet" the way mischivous people do it.. is dumb..
If they want to make a distributed computer system for making this type of attach.. the government could easily design a computer for this specific purpose and distribute them to isp or at least major network choak points and do a lot more efficent/usefull attack/counter attack.
The next thing you know its going to be the Nato-net and the Comu-net.
What sane person would even think of letting our military (but god bless the soldiers, wave the flag now, sing the anthem etc...) -or any other acronym based "service/agency" for that matter- do something so dangerous to the common U.S. citizen John Q. Public?
Why don't we just let the government blatantly spy on us, arrest us without warrants? Or make a mockery of our constitution? Ohhh sh.. wait they already did and are! If the people have the government they deserve. It seems that "we the people" are not very smart!
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Yep, that's the logical way to do it.
The problem is that this is an illogical response. What are they going to actually do with this patriotic attack system? DDoS a zombie? A few zombies? A hundred zombies?
At some point, the battle becomes worse than the attack. The attacker has thousands (hundreds of thousands? a million?) zombies. What use is "attacking" them like this?
Yeah, let's ratchet this one up. They have bots, now we must have bots. Our bots will be better than their bots. Our bots will wreak havoc on their stuff.
Next will be mutually-assured folder deletion, e-commerce tracking (we must find terrorists, after all, will be the mantra), and the military's machines will crawl to a halt because the bots will take over the CPU strokes in the machines.
I can see a command that governs bot defense and blocks at NAP points. Otherwise, it's another arms race.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Whoever decided this DID NOT see Terminator 3.... Skynet = large botnet! It will turn on us!! AHH
Hey, while I think the current administration is repugnant and creates military enemies out of greed, and regards government and the military as nothing but a means to a financial end, I have to say I still think the military fights for the nation, and sometimes, must follow a corrupt president to prevent constitutional destruction. Honor our troups and all. I agree with it. These guys do their duty regardless of the ahole in the whitehouse sending them heaven knows where to fight for oil.
That being said, China, Iran, etc. have nothing on patriotic americans. Americans will do what they think is right and good for the country when ever asked to do so. The current problems with the U.S.A. are about what "right and good" are, not about whether or not to do it.
We don't need a botnet. Just tell america why it "right and good" to do something, put proper protections and limitations in it to ensure that the wrong people don't exploit your patriotism and it will happen.
I know that is naive, but part of me still believes that America has a noble streak that lately has been obscured by corporate greed.
In the interest of national security, I'm for it.
I don't mind my ISP going down in the event the USAF Botnet takes down an attack from China or whoever.
In case you all haven't kept tabs on China, they're up to all sorts of no good and we should all be prepared for the worse.
I'm really not sure how they think a botnet would help against DDoS type attacks. They know what the first "D" is for right? It's not like they could simultaneously take out all the nodes on an enemy botnet. The biggest problem that they have to realize is that botnets like storm are maintained by people who just like to mess with other people. And as a matter of intellectual exercise. The amount of drive these people put into building maintaining botnets and the like is not something the military can hope to mirror, especially with red tape in place. Assuming they did pull it off, it would make the central controllers a delicious target... what could possibly go wrong.
Fucking absurd!! They try to infect any of my clients networks with their botnet and WE WILL SUE the SHIT out of them!!
It's hardly a panacea but just block any computers called "Gomer Pyle", Sgt. Hartmann" and "HUAA!", and you're halfway there...
"USAF botnet hijacked by spammers"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
i've always maintained that the 2nd amendment should be interpreted in the 21st century to include the right to keep & bear compilers, decompilers, fully functional (non-drm/'trusted') h/w...
But - and this is the important part - it is extremely unclear as to who the "they" are. The US Government is big, different departments have different policies and philosophies, what holds true for some branch A may not hold true for some other branch B, and so on. For example, I can't really imagine the regular US Army or Navy using a botnet. That's not, as a whole, their style. Remember, the US Navy is looking at semi-robotic next-generation Ironclads/Battleships with hundreds of missile launchers on each side. There is nothing subtle or stealthy about the Navy. Their sneers and jeers at Sweeden examining stealth ships is further evidence that these guys are about as subtle as a rocket-propelled 2x4.
Now, what about other departments? We already know that there are departments that indulge in signals intelligence, electronic and cyber warfare, covert operations, and so on. By definition, we do not know what those departments are involved in, and by definition they would be unable to tell us honestly if they were - or if they weren't. That makes it easy to be paranoid, as there is no way of testing any speculation as to what they are doing. We might know in 50 years time, some secrets may be held back for 100, some secrets may never be known (documents lost or destroyed, for example, as happened in the My Lai warcrimes investigations). Paranoia is the antitheses of rational thought, and in matters in which limited (or zero) information exist, rational thought should be of paramount importance. Insanity helps nobody, least of all yourself.
The evidence is slender, but is strongly suggestive one department already has backdoors on vulnerable boxes. After cyber-attacks elsewhere in the world, protective measures by the US will have increased, not decreased. Ethics aside, at least one military botnet under US control probably exists, as it probably does for Russia, China and probably other nations. I imagine, given the advanced education and the perceived need (it may also be a real need, but nobody acts on real needs they don't perceive as such) by Israel and India that they also have botnets. Britain's brain-drain has probably deprived it of too much talent at this point, but GCHQ and the various clandestine intelligence departments (we don't even know what departments there are - only two officially even exist, but at least one other has been officially mentioned) might have such a system in place, but more likely for intelligence purposes than for attack.
But what about the ethical standpoint? Well, ethics covers a multitude of sins, and most people have different ethics, making any kind of rational ethical argument difficult. I will stick to one point alone, then, and it's not the obvious one concerning those running the botnets. It's the ethical consideration of running an insecure machine. If you are a patriot, is it not your duty to secure your computer? If you do not, then any (and possibly every) hostile power could - and probably eventually will - run a node of the botnet on your machine. If you are a sympathizer of a foreign power, is it not your duty to secure your computer? If you do not, then your country could - and probably eventually will - run a node of a defensive botnet on your machine. If you are apolitical, then is it not your moral duty to secure your machine, so that nobody can abuse your facilities for their political purposes? If you're an anarchist, isn't it politically unacceptable to allow a government to maintain/impose order through you?
In short, it is unethical to leave your machine insecure, no matter what your political stance. No matter w
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
expose the gov's network infrastructure which could result in more targeted attacks on govt networks.
Already are efforts to disable or attack spammers botnets infiltrating in their own communication channels. You put a widely deployed botnet, and could eventually be used against you or the ones that carry it.
In the other hand, installing something being aware of it, like some of the distributed computing efforts (like seti@home, or similars), could be better.
It sounds like some jr highschool kid's idea. What is the military going to do, call up Kim Jong-il and say "ke ke ke PW0n3gE! How you liek the intrnetz n0w? bizatch."? If someone is "attacking" us via the internet, there is a much easier solution: block their traffic, null route their netblock, or even just "drop anchor" on their cable.
tm
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What are the legalities of doing such a thing? That's my first thought.
It could be pretty useful for the U.S.
I also believe they'd get a lot of takers if they made the client available to install.
Call it CyberWar@Home.
Give it a lot of stats to brag about:
"My system helped DDOS 1,000 Chinese owned bots and helped break over 150 bot-net control keys. Go USA!"
I completely agree that this is a dumb idea -- as dumb as training Osama bin Laden to kick out the Soviets. As dumb as arming Saddam to attack Iran. As dumb as propping up the Saudi theocrats in return for unlimited oil supplies. You don't raise a snake and expect it not to bite back. Unfortunately, the 'smart' Ph.D.'s who've probably never had the sun shine on their skins populating sundry 'think tanks' that drive such policies will never learn. Morons.
Security of the "botnet network" would be my biggest concern. Some people are real good at cracking things, and as mentioned before this must be deployed on a lot of external computers to be effective. What are the odds we could be deploying the infrastructure that would in fact be used against us.
-Tim
Stick with foreign entities.
And remember routing.
The "routing around damage" part of the internet makes it difficult to explicity (and more important, exclusively) target a single entity.
I have probably mentioned this before. The USAF cybercommand is bottom tier even among the defense organizations when it comes to IA/IO. Let alone among non-DOD organizations. They lack the flexibility and the competence to do manage their networks. Get a clue! Step 1: learn to patch, before opening a new can a worms. Step 2: Contract it out! hint: not Boeing!
there are already heaploads of waivers, loopholes NSA has under its belt. they should secretly maintain their own civilian botnet ffs. thats what china is doing.
Read radical news here
"I don't think that word means what you think it means".
A "botnet" is strictly illegal according to US law. It is made up of compromised computers. Not only would creating a botnet (compromising and taking over civilian computers) go against many Fedarel and state laws, it would likely be deemed unconstitutional, going against the third amendment. Is there any difference between "quartering soldiers" in civilian homes and and using other civilian property? Is it OK for the military to commandeer your private auto? Your barn?
I believe what the fellow is saying is using their OWN computers. That is not a botnet, whether you're using the cluster to dDoS someone or predict the weather. A cluster is only a botnet if you don't own the computers in the cluster or have their owners' permission to use them.
First "gay", then "hacker", then "intellectial property" now "botnet"? In all these cases there are already perfectly useable and correct words, there is no reason to further bastardise the language and add to miscommunication. Unless, of course, your use of language is obfuscation rather than communication.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If you take government money (even local) as part of your pay, then they can place the software on your machines.
Cell phones, laptops, desktops, servers - all subject to the bot.
Agreed, 110%!
However?
Well - I'd want to be DAMN SURE & CERTAIN that we were attacked first, & I'd demand proof I could verify, myself (not too hard) & then? Hehe, I wouldn't NEED a botnet to go back after whoever it was! I'd wager a LOT of the responders here can/could, easily, do the same... & WITHOUT a botnet also.
Right now, on a personal level, the ONLY thing that holds me back from exercising a "bit of payback" to certain parties online? The laws of the United States!
I don't break them if I can help it... However, that's about it (a pretty big "that's it" though - because I am not going to waste what freedom I still have, for knocking some fool or pack of fools around online, via a computerized attack - TOO EASY to do, especially a DOS/DDOS)...
Plus? Hey - sometimes, it's enough to make them look like fools, via "out-teching" (for lack of a better expression) them, in front of the planet & ESPECIALLY on their OWN ballcourt.
Takes me a LOT to get angry (or, rather, STUPID enough) to go & attack someone, without sufficient provocation though. I have to be 100% dead up sure & have SOLID proof, to go & do so (& then, there is the law to consider too - if that "chain" wasn't on me? LOL, well... you know!)
APK
P.S.=> However, if it came to such a thing, & my nation needed my computer time? I'd volunteer it, minus a botnet... just give me the IP Addresses in question, they'll be down & out, in minutes (change their IP's or block me? I'll just come @ you via another, via proxy... too easy!)... apk
Skynet
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Great idea. Declare war on NATO allies. Or how do they plan to make sure there are no bots in NATO countries?
Maybe something good might come of this if they set the botnets on those Russian email spammers and shut them down with a denial of service attack! Just think of all those electrons that would be spared!
could be even worse than offending /.robbIE, insofar as having your ip blocked, your inf. censored, &/or your web servers vandalized? better days ahead?
Government bad.
Or do I just misunderstand what they actually need to do? I mean, shoot, let's just fire up a bunch of AWS instances and infect them! The whole war could take place in EC2 and it would only cost like $.14/GB transferred. . . Hell of a lot cheaper than invading China by land. Also, another good reason to stay on my mac: it's like buying conscientious objector status.
yes. that's all I'm going to say in all comments from now on.
We seem to just keep getting more of these, popping up like dandelions. "We're introducing a new system for the public good. It's a great system, unless it's abused, which even though there are no stong safeguards in place, we're sure will never happen."
Problem is, of the people calling the shots, 1/2 of them are saying "Gee that sounds like a great idea, lets do it." The other half are saying "Gee that sounds like a great idea, can you go over once more how someone might abuse it?"
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
So will they construct their botnet by turning personal computers that have already been compromised by malware? If the PC's already been taken over they can claim salvage rights and take it for the military's purposes?
I imagine this as a large box, labeled 'Pandora', with a huge red 'open me' button on it...
To date, warfare is warfare. We have guns and bombs, planes and ship and tanks, etc, to fend off similar threats. But that's essentially the limit. We do not, as far as I am aware, have any non-military weapons in the hands of the military.
This proposal seems to insinuate that the military should be welcome to consider non-gun, non-bomb, non-traditional methods of securing American interests.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm fairly certain there's no Constitutional provision for this... Likewise, if there WERE such a creature, wouldn't if fall into the hands of the executive branch, rather than the military? CIA seems a more likely candidate for such a program, were it designed for attack - a pure-defensive option would be within the hands of DHS, via the FBI, or some such.
Since we're entering new realms of thought here, what OTHER types of attacks are acceptable additions to our military's arsenal? In fact, are there any that are off-limits at all?
Economic weapons? Would it be permissible for the US military to buy out enough of 'X' to cause the economy of an enemy to fail?
Cultural? Carpet-bombing bibles, blue jeans, and Britney Spears?
Agricultural? Secretly infect the fields with weeds rendering crops far more difficult to grow? Or perhaps poison the gene pool of whatever the enemy is producing?
These are SILLY examples, I'll admit, but to me the notion of the military being the stewards of the internet is equally as silly...
I wish we were a better nation. I wish we'd turn the other cheek on stuff like this, all the while keeping up international pressure for others to do likewise. Sure, sure, China, Russia, blah blah blah. No amount of what the neighbor is doing makes this acceptable to me.
In my humble opinion, some things should be hands-off to the military, just as their planes, tanks, and ships are hands-off to the rest of us...
He tries to draw an example from the physical world. first, I don't know how many air force bases he has been too but most have some hardened concrete defenses beyond the chain link fence. many, in fact, have bunkers which are very much the most physical sort of fort ever. His example from WWII, only illustrates how important is to control the airspace above your fortifications. bunkers again have roofs. air dropping people on top of it would not have the same affect. in fact, would be completely ineffective. Second, he is totally overlooking the role physical placement, security, and access controls have in the role of the security of a network, of the internet core. Then, when he describe a bot net. He really just described how most networks are run. He coud do everything he says he wants to from a typical Network Operations center because GET THIS, THEY ALREADY CONTROL A GEOGRAPHICALLY DISBURSED NETWORK OF DESKTOPS, SERVERS IN SEVERAL CLASS B ADDRESS SPACES. moron.
Article"...deterrent towards those who would attempt to DDoS government networks" Excuse my naiveness, but how exactly does building an army of botnet(s) equal to a deterrence / defensive mechanism against those who would attempt to DDoS government networks? Is this a case of, we now have "nukes" so don't try nuking us, or we'll nuke you back? Is the US army proposing a cyber arms race here? Also, if all their subnets are attacked via DDoS, there'll be no out path to execute a counter attack... unless that's what all those barely unused IBM, HP, Xerox, etc.. IPv4 /8 blocks are being reserved for.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
this line is quite intriguing... ...sounds like the civilian is the enemy. Im sure they think that too.
"If the botnet is used in a strictly offensive manner, civilian computers may be attacked, but only if the enemy compels us."
You don't fight fire with fire. Send a unmanned drone to fly over the offending area and drop an Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb (EMP) on it.
It's too bad the author(s) had to use the buzzword of the day ("BotNet"), instead of calling this a distributed network. "US Air Force to create a distributed network using surplus computers" just doesn't have the same punch though.
Lurchicus - For Sig, see other side.
...doesn't know economics.
And the grandparent is just a moron.
::Guy living in the USA::
I suppose retrospectively Geneva convention is just used by the victors to hang people it deemed didn't play by the rules but overlooked when their own troops did the same.
I suppose if one day we find ourselves on the wrong end of an occupation with say Chinese-Russia alliance that I personally hope they'll abide by the Geneva conventions.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
NO weapons are to be stored or carried into a HOSTPITAL, hospitals have computers too.
Physical security concepts do not always translate well in to Information Security. Sure, there's some overlap between the two realms. And sometimes it is convenient to use physical security analogies to describe information security concepts. But ultimately the two are very different.
These subtle and not-so-subtle differences seem to be lost on many who's understanding is based on physical security. They are often hell-bent on applying what they know to this new realm. And because of this, many of their actions are doomed to fail in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
The fundamental difference between these two realms are the rules by which they work. The physical world is governed by the laws of physics â" or at least our understanding of them. Advancements in technology allow us access to capabilities that our adversaries might not even know are possible. But at best, that's a slight tweak to what is, ultimately, a fairly static reality.
Information security, however, exists in a world of protocols and environments that are entirely of our own choosing. There are market and functional pressures that impact those choices. But ultimately, if a protocol or environment fails, it can be replaced with a better protocol or environment. Or we simply turn it off.
Force is a necessity in the physical security world. It is the ultimate method to implementing one's will. In the physical world you apply force to prevent an adversary from going from Point A to Point B. The laws of physics otherwise allows your adversary free rein to go where they want. Within the information security realm, you change peering, protocols, platforms, etc. and your adversary has an entirely different set of rules to deal with.
With that in mind, I really wonder what the application of a military botnet would be. There are a lot more efficient ways of dealing with an attacker than launching a DoS attack against the target. The only useful scenario that comes to mind is if one is launching an attack at a C&C target.
Why does it matter whether the use military or civilian machines? Aren't the internets just a series of tubes?
Big hint: It's a bad idea because you (for sure) won't have 100% intel on your allies computer resources ...
Is it even a military thing? I thought that's what you had the NSA for...
Andy.
I guess the 10 year rule applies, did this guy forget about when the USAF knocked out the Bank of Mexico with its "cutting edge active network defense"?
I guess I don't mind the military exploring the use of bot-nets for use in a technological war, but I am surprised that more slashdotters are not offended by this in the comments so far. I would think this raises some serious "Orwellian" red flags.
While the theory is sound ("Fight fire with fire!"), illegal/malicious botnets have literally millions of potential additions to their botnets around the world, as they take over friendly PCs. A DoD BotNet would have to make use of, presumably, tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, of locally (or at least domestically-based) PCs for their botnet, making the price of maintaining such a network extreme, requiring scaling every year to keep up with the largest of the malicious botnets, and a level of security passed what we have seen before.
Also, since most already know that government networks aren't exactly the end-all be-all in networking security, wouldn't a beautifully constructed botnet with hundreds of thousands of potentially identical PCs, constructed for the sole-purpose of BEING A BOTNET, create the juiciest, most identifiable target to malicious botnets? Won't there be tons of attacks on this botnet to try and commandeer it or take it down?
Seems to me like they are going to fight fire with fire and wind up just adding fuel to both.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Conventions and international agreements are nice.
But there are no rules in war.
Just make sure you win. If you don't, get rid of any evidence.
You hit the nail on the head.
When do the men with guns descend on Redmond?
Or is this all ready in SP1 for vista.
No wounder vista is a CPU hog.
Using the guise of the second amendment to the consititution to "promote a well organized militia", I submit that it is every citizen's duty make their PC(s) available as bots to the military.
Hell, I bet we could have millions of them out there in factories, homes, bunkers waiting for some commie, I mean, terrorist to try and take over the old red, white, and blue.
HELP!!!!
My PC just got drafted by the US Gov't and its killing my latency!!!!
Would a botnet sap and impurify my liquid-cooled computer's precious bodily fluids?
It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive."
Text available at http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-proto.htm
"All governments are liars and murderers." - Bill Hicks
protest the lack of choices in America for President by voting for BILL HICKS. Sure, he's dead, but so are many of the voters.
Wesley Snipes for vice-president!
In America, we're all still free to be as stupid as we want to be.
Asshole.
Either our AFCYBER brigade is light years behind, or we're finally willing to publicly disclose this information due to some 'other' undisclosed reason...??
Anyhow, I've always assumed that our Military and other various agencies have control of some rather large botnets, but after working around such networks, it would actually surprise me more if they did (intentionally) run a botnet, than not (or unintentionally/unwittingly). I hope AFCYBER
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
As other comments have noted, what makes a botnet powerful is its distributed nature, harnessing the bandwidth of hundreds of ISP's. A "botnet" limited to dot-mil space is no more a "botnet" than any big ol' single computer with a fat pipe to the backbone.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
why go to the lengths of creating a botnet from scatch? Use open source software to achieve your idealistic vision of what constitutes world and cyberspace domination! I've already gotten a debian based botnet. Yes, its called DSH. here is my proof of concept. ~#$HOST=terrorists|boogeyman_du_jour|ex_wife|unknown ~# dsh -a ping -f -c X -S 1024 $HOST Implemented by your local friendly BOFH.
Bought the ticket, taking the ride.
Chilling words. how would you like to have your Homebrew Robotics club, or DMCA activist group designated as a "Domestic Terror" organisation?
They ARE after you, Citizen!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
use of military satellites to flood 3G/WiMax/whatever cell towers with packets for nasty and apparently global "botnet". SkyNet lives. Just a thought.
Let's take some of your statements:
What the conventions actually say is that it's forbidden to perform certain acts. However, if one party commits such acts, it doesn't mean that any civilian population is then "fair game". Civilians are never "fair game".
The fact that some of the acts of one party are forbidden, doesn't mean the other party may commit crimes in response. Specifically, the Geneva conventions talk of proportionality: "Art. 53. Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations." Given furthermore the fact that Israeli's occupation of Gaza is illegal by international law in general, any action taken by Israel to keep Gaza occupied is in fact a crime (though not necessarily by the Geneva conventions, which only deals with very specific humanitarian issues).
Actually the Geneva conventions cover several aspects about war that have humanitarian consequences: the treatment of prisoners of war, the treatment of a population by their occupier, and so on.
It's the responsibility, not the discretion of the commander.
It's very true that no army ever respects the Geneva conventions. Israel, the United States and many other countries tend to profess how humane their acts of war are. Ofcourse, the harder they claim this, the more of a lie it usually is. (Collective punishment in Palestine, 10,000s of civilian prisoners of war without any outlook on a trial, but with rampant torture going on, the United States ofcourse has Guantanamo Bay, the en-masse destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq during both wars there, and so on). Regarding the statement you make about Hezbollah's declarations on multiple occasions, would you mind providing a reference to one such declaration?
This has three possible forms it could take:
1) Distributed cluster on military-owned hardware.
2) Civilian recruitment scheme.
3) Violation of the 3rd Amendment.
Option 1) would be viable, considering all the various systems in military bases around the world. However, it would not have the same power as the botnets it's fighting against, which have the full power of millions of broadband connections at their disposal.
Option 2) is like hiding bombs in schools and churches. While voluntary, it invites civilian attacks from the enemy.
Option 3), releasing it "into the wild," and allowing it to compromise unwitting people's computers: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
I'm quite surprised there aren't more allusions to SkyNet.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
If that offends you, imagine what Hamas/Hezbollah would do to the Jews if they were in the situation the Palestinians are in - utterly outclassed militarily. If they didn't leave, they'd all be dead in a few weeks.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Why not have an Opensource Botnet that anyone can voluntarily participate in... "the collective" actions of the botnet can be submitted by anyone and voted on... only actions where greater than 50% of members agree on would be executed.
Skynet.
can they please DDoS Nigeria? I think that would truly be to the benefit of everyone in the world, excluding Nigerians of course.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Ummm . . . three?
Dude, we're talking about the Pentagon; the same group that buys $400 hammers, $600 toilet seats, and $20 ice trays.
;-)
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Then why does Israel continue to give the Palestinians water and fuel?
:
Because they're Jews. The basic doctrine that makes them do this goes something like this (I'm no Jew, don't shoot me if I get the details wrong) :
The Jews work to be the best of the people in God's image, and one way to do this is to care for all living things within the provisions set in the Torah. All humans are to be cared for, including their worst enemies, and it is utterly irrelevant how much of the help is used to attack Jews.
That's why they provide the fuel that gets converted into kassem rockets and fired into Jewish schools. Because a lot of that fuel also goes into keeping kids alive on cold nights (despite the general opinion, it gets quite cold in Gaza, certainly as cold as in, oh, say Denmark, so you really, really need the heating operational).
That's why they provide hospitals for Gazans to give birth to the very babies that will be indoctrinated with Jew hatred in every mosque and every school in Gaza and the west bank. That's why they treat even terrorists who blow themselves up making explosives.
The same goes for plants in Israel : if at all possible, the irrigation systems are extended to sustain both agrarian crops and trees and whatever that grows nearby (please don't interpret this as that I say gazans and plants are the same, people *are* more important in Jewish/Christian doctrine than plants).
This attitude is the reason Israel looks like the south of France (every last tree in Israel is irrigated), and Gaza and the west bank look like the sahara, despite being about 10km apart.
Obviously you won't find this on CNN or the BBC.
Can we not afford our own fuel?
No. Gaza has an economy that AS A WHOLE makes less money than 1 average american.
Water we have nowhere from where to get
Have you noticed the mediteranean sea ? Israel also has to get it's water, except for portions of the Golan, out of the sea.
Yes you have to create power plants to desalinize the water. But so does Israel.
but fuel we can buy. So why does Israel keep us dependent on them?
Israel is not preventing anyone in Gaza from buying fuel across the Egyptian border. How could they ?
Hamas has blown up that border twice in the last year, which is obviously not helpful. But Mubarak decided to forgive and forget.
I want Hamas to stop buying Qwsam rockets and to start buying fuel. So does everybody else.
They claim a certain prophet does not want this. Here's the way Hamas puts it in their charter
First, why they think the way they think :
"Article One: The Ideological Aspects
The Islamic Resistance Movement draws its guidelines from Islam; derives from it its thinking, interpretations and views about existence, life and humanity; refers back to it for its conduct; and is inspired by it in whatever step it takes."
All that hamas does, including "keeping you dependant on Israel" is only what (they think) islam requires of them :
"Article Thirteen: Peaceful Solutions, [Peace] Initiatives and International Conferences
[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion"
ANY peaceful solution is, to hamas, apostacy, it's against islam, which carries the death penalty as you probably know.
I happen to think they're right. Islam does require this of muslims. Therefore the solution for palestine is simple : drop this part of islam. And acknowledge publicly that you've dropped it. Whatever excuse you want, nobody cares, because it kills too many Gazans for example. Then Gaza can start growing and caring for it's people.
You might notice that NONE of the suicide bombers ever was anyone with even a minor rank within hamas. So if you think the leadership of hamas actually believe in islam, think again (and check their bank accounts).
welcome our new SKYNET overlord
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
What about Geneva Conventions, 1977 Part IV, Chapter 1, Article 51
...) doesn't matter in the least.
Yes what about it ? It refers only that an army has to respect the other rules, which includes the rule that if civilians are used as human shields by a non-regular army, the use of violence against said civilians is allowed.
If you honestly read the convention you'll see it comes down to "an army must give it's opponent the chance to face it in an abandoned area, away from any civilians. If (and only if) the opponent complies, civilians are protected from harm of either of the parties". If the opponent refuses to do this, whatever their base is, even if it is a child daycare center of unrelated people, can be attacked without recourse.
This rule was once considered as being part of canon law, and is distinctly Christian in origin (e.g. both Thoraic and Sharia law consider it an acceptable tactic of war to poison the water supply of an unsuspecting city merely because they *might* oppose you)
"Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited
Just "not caring" (ie not directly attacking them
The fact that some of the acts of one party are forbidden, doesn't mean the other party may commit crimes in response.
Yes, I claim however that shooting human shields used by irregular opponents (non-uniformed or otherwise not clearly recognizeable or people who fight in an urban zone) is NOT a crime in the geneva convention.
The other parts of your response are mere conspiracy theories.
>a genocide in Gaza would be clearly within Israel's rights under the Geneva conventions
Fourth Geneva Convention, Part III, Section 1, Article 33 forbids collective punishments.
>there isn't a single warring faction in the world today, except the United States (and Israel, Turkey and "maybe" China (insofar you call Tibet a war, besides I doubt you will find China respecting Geneva in Africa)), that even pretend to respect the Geneva conventions.
How about Somali gunmen? When Michael Durant was captured, after first violating the Geneva Convention by shooting propaganda video of him, they eventually agreed to Geneva Convention treatment and a Red Cross visit.
I almost agree with this, as in there's not a whole lot of reason for me to disagree. I'm not scared of Cyberarmageddon! coming around any corners any time soon, the internet is clearly becoming more and more important and it's already a stiflingly critical resource in the economy of most of the world.
There may not be a whole lot of use for a DDoS attack for defense at the moment, I can see a hundred ways that it can be used as a deterrent. The only problem is that a DDoS will be about as effective at stopping another DDoS as fire is at putting out another fire.
Yes, I do believe that the government should venture into the internet defense/offense force, as long as they stay the fuck out of -my- computer.
And... don't go starting any wars ping-flooding a Chinese server.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
It's pretty hard to sue and get money from some guy in Russia that attacks your computer.
When the US government does it, that sounds like the deep pockets to me!
To say this is a bad idea would be an understatment. For one thing I would be surprised indeed if there were not botnets run and controlled by governments. I would be even more surprised if the US was not one of those governements, however; there is a difference between running a covert bot-net and creating one in the open covered by US laws. First a couple of things in this post really got alarm bells ringing for me.
"civilian computers may be attacked, but only if the enemy compels us."
What is being said here is that we won't attack your computer unless we have to, but I have to take the millitary's word for it. By nessesity the means which the enemy uses to "compel" would be secret, as would the responce. I may be slow but I am not stupid, I certainly don't trust the military with that kind of power.
"respect the law of armed conflict"
Are we to treat the entire internet now as an armed conflict? This is a very very slippry slope and there needs to be careful consideration before we apply it to something so broad and international and the network of networks we call "the internet". If it is a war, does that mean we can expect US soldiers storming data centres in Sweden in the name of the RIAA?
But those are broad moral implications, what about practical ones. Would it be legal to remove a DnD trojan or root kit? Would the antivirus vendors have to be involved? How about the security groups that hunt down disable the command and control funtions of botnets. From what I can tell removing such a bot or disabling it's command and control centres as discribed in this post, could be construded as treason.
There is another reason that it is better these things are done in secret. They are illegal and should remain so. The government should NEVER participate in them. So if they are done, and those who initiate them are wrong, their heads, their careers, their freedom goes, rightfully, on the block.
They are about who's left.
(R.A. Heinlein - who basically agrees with you.)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Straw man arguments are lies.
Those military computers may be geographically far-flung, but I'd be surprised if they were as dispersed on a network diagram. It's not like the US military dials into local POPs, or gets a routed network connection from Okinawa ISP Inc. or Riyahd Wireless.
A military botnet hosted on a military network defeats the point - now they know where it's coming from, and how to stop it: get upstream to not route. However, if the botnet attack is coming from every network at once (true distributed botnet), then it's harder to respond effectively.
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3375884
the entire article is full of some amazingly badly thought out justifications and ideas.
there are a stack of alternative solutions which protect computers or evade attack entirely, with diminishing returns on each of course.
Stealing and using civilians' property for military purposes is patently criminal. DDOS is also a very childish form of attack that a legitimate government should never want to use. Using network access for jamming and denial of service attacks is 100% sure to break any ISP deals and laws.
Internet works because people and governments put resources in it for it to work. Competing who is best at cutting off that access and jamming the networks, defeats the purpose of having a network in the first place, namely: COMMUNICATION. -- If you don't want to communicate with the other people on the network, then don't. Nothing and nobody is forcing you to.
If USA "needs" to DDOS or deny communications to someone, they can just as well send a cruise missile to them without knowingly harming and involving innocent civilians in it.
In any situation, having the network operational and communicating brings more benefit to everyone listening it than stopping it from working with childish jamming technologies. Sustained attacks would also surely cause the "targets" to move to using other un-jammable, secure methods of communication.
Whoever came up with this idea is a juvenile idiot who doesn't understand the benefits of having a network in the first place. I am rather aghast at the very stupidity that must happen in governments to consider suggesting such an idea in the first place. -- Which would you rather have? A network listening to your adversaries' thoughts and planning, or a network that is cut off from them through childish DDOS attacks, and forces them to use other (more reliable and secure) means of communications?
Botnets are useful for spammers and kids, serious military strategists should never want to use them.
You must be thinking of some other conventions. The Geneva conventions don't say much about how war should be waged, but rather how prisoners and civilians and such should be treated. You know, stuff like not trashing a civilian's property as punishment for being "the enemy". Is it a human rights violation to conscript a neutral civilian's computer into your army? It depends on your perspective, I suppose.
willeyhill posting on a thread started by twitter. I mean, what are the odds, especially when an account with such few comments seems to spend so much time replying to twitter and his other sockpuppets.
First, there is no such thing as "Thoraic". You mean Talmudic or Halakhaic law? Get your terms right.
Second, please back up your statement that poisoning of water is permitted under Jewish and Islamic laws.
Prophet Muhammad expressly forbade his troops from killing of children, women or old people (as long as they are not active combatants), monks/nuns, cutting of trees, killing of livestock, or destruction of buildings.
Please site a credible reference if you have one.
"The system also needs to avoid tampering ...disabling the botnet code if an automated check indicated the code has been altered."
so if someone changes our botnet software, our software will report it? right?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the purple monkey dishwasher
Gaza is illegally occupied according to international law, and the people there are suffering from daily injustices (travel, supplies,
Please cite what the "Islamist government of Egypt (whatever that may be)" does in the south that is "war"
So get the facts straights before you spew your bias
I, for one, propose that we form a start-up government contract company. Since the government will almost certainly demand that someone build a special botnet for this, we could build stripped down custom, cheap, computers to do the work. Slap a copy of linux on them, and we're set. Plus, we'll be the only one's that can maintain this special system, so we'll get all the maintenance work. I think we can build nodes that are nothing more than a 486, 64MB, 10MB ethernet, and PXE boot. We'll sell each node to the government for somewhere between $500-1000, and a special 'controller' node (same specs but with a harddrive) for $1500-2000. And we're rich!!!
You're, after all, risking your own life for it. The other parts of your response are mere conspiracy theories. Is this the best you can do? No, that's the best I'm willing to do. Your claims are too stupid to be realistic, your numbers inflated beyond recognition, and the sources for them are beyond ridiculous.
In a lot of countries you have got Conscription. Maybe you will have to donate a part of your computer to your home land soon, when the computer turns 18 years old.
If you want to DDOS a victims IP you don't need any fancy botnet, just update the DNS to point http://slashdot.org to the victims IP and let the Slashdot effect take them down
There are about 1 billion muslims. There are far, far, fewer Islamists.
The military already has millions of computers with access to the Internet. All it would take is to make the botnet client part of the standard load. The next time China decides to hack us, DDOS them back.
The DoD will succeed handily, partly because even those wary of downloading a Windows update know that "cyberwarfare battle attack bot" sounds way more badass than "Silverlight".
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Have the devices inspect packets passing through them, like maybe from AV vendors or Windows Update or the device vendor's own pornblocking and anti-malware rulesets, looking for a particular "wake up, phone home" signal. First stage, wake up and report in. Second stage, accept targetting information and await further instructions. Third stage, launch. Do it in the routers themselves and most people would never notice - all their firewalling and packet inspection voodoo (if they're paranoid enough to have any, most won't) will be inside their own networks or on their own box.
Bury that feature deep enough, include extra features like pornblocking and censorware that can be manipulated by the local regime, and market the chipset and/or completed devices through a shell company not covered officially by US embargos - bingo, instant order for a couple of container loads of devices for Iran. Hell, free home-use porn blocking with a list maintained by a commercial provider and licenced either by the device manufacturer or for a nominal fee by end-users would get the things adopted by many families all over the world. Add in some phone-home features (maybe reporting visits to prohibited sites back to a central authority, or certain kinds of data as a distributed traffic-analysis tool) and you've got another reason more totatitarian and less open governments might mandate them - hide the US Botnet feature in a real commercial product from some far-east manufacturer and your enemies might not even notice.
A little more attractive than a big wooden horse, don't you think?
PROXY WARFARE....
Firs, flags up our asses. Now what? BOTS up our asses? Poking the civilian backbone... I guess they want to reclaim the fruits of DARPA, take us to the combative token (but possibly Tolkien) ring... By the Lord of the Flies, we'll be floored by the lies...
Anyway, to reassembling the packets... To that, i say, "FSCK" that... They can keep their armed political forays in the realm of the military.
What's next, an RFC or an RFP to "draft" personal computers into service? I think that is "crossing the wire in the ether" (to make a pun on "crossing the line in a sand")... hehehe
(captcha: eunuchs)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
"The U.S. will perform the same target preparation as for traditional targets and respect the law of armed conflict as Defense Department policy requires by analyzing necessity, proportionality and distinction among military, dual-use or civilian targets."
An estimated three hundred thousand Iraqi civilians directly killed by US military operations shows how wonderfully good the US military is at preventing "collateral damage".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
This is what I propose.
Since the BOTNET software has to reside on our PC and we are scared that it could be used aagianst us then we each purchase a second PC - specifically for this task. Nothing too expensive (heck they should even subsidise it). Then we keep this second PC unplugged in the corner and go about our business on our regular PC.
Then when the excriment hits the fan, the government tells everyone to boot-up. We all hook in and voila!
The PC in question would not have any of our own sensitive data on it and it can be plugged / unplugged as required.
idea, using old computers because it would keep millions of them out of landfills. But, then they're so OLD. Then, I thought, "Why not use honey nets"? But, then it's possibly a single point of failure. We all know the mil doesn't like relics, and it doesn't like SPOFs (single points of failure)...
Maybe they can have a Million Computers March? A new line of firewall given meaning...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Can anybody explain to me why any part of the government would require a botnet for something as trivial as a DDoS? Most interesting international links seem to leave the U.S. in just a few dozen points. Add one or two cute little packet generators with a enough bandwidth to satisfy those links, randomize the source addresses and bang, you got yourself an unstoppable source of DDoS without all the hassles that come with a botnet.
Unfortunately all of that sounds so annoyingly boring. Botnets are way more buzzwordier and can leverage more synergies when coupled with extreme team-building seminars, so that's what it's gonna be.
Oh, P.S.: The "Telcos wouldn't do it" counter-argument ain't valid. This is about NATIONAL SECURITEH, so neither costs nor constitutional rights nor anything else holds up against it.
That's a pretty big "except"; and the treatment of civilians part includes protections of civilian property against reprisals, germane to the immediate discussion.
As it is quite impossible to know something that is not true, no.
This is not even remotely true. No such limitation exists on, e.g., the protection of civilians in Geneva (IV), particularly Article II thereof.
On the contrary, no nation that is a signatory of the Conventions, as most are, except the United States, has had high government officials state that it is not bound by the Geneva Conventions in regard to a particular international armed conflict.
Since you seem to be referring to internal rather than international armed conflicts, which are generally outside of the scope of the Geneva Conventions, I think you are missing the point. There are certainly examples of states that have failed to do much to seem to adhere to the Conventions in international armed conflicts, but you don't seem to be focussing on those.
One might note that the 1949 Geneva Conventions were essentially updates of older conventions (the first Geneva Convention of 1949 was an update of the Geneva Convention of 1864, the second Geneva Convention of 1949 was an update of the Hague Convention (X) of 1907, the third Geneva Convention of 1949 was an update of the Geneva Convention of 1929, and the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 was, in part, an update of parts of the Hague Convention (IV) of 1907.) One might also note that various Axis military officers and officials were tried, convicted, and either imprisoned or executed for violations of those prior conventions and other provisions of international law. No law that exists will, without enforcement, merely by existing stop all possible violations.
Presumably, you are referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is simply a declaration of principles. The actual substantive implementation of those principles is in other treaties.
Well, no, a more accurate interpretation would be that those attempting to violate the principles of the United Nations as delineated in the Charter (which waging aggressive war does but abolishing the UDHR itself may not), in so doing, exceed the boundaries of the rights declared by the UDHR; that does not mean that they lose any of the rights they have under
But physical dispersal would allow physical network access in all of the locations (i.e. it's not like the US military couldn't dial into "Okinawa ISP Inc" just for this application). You'd likely not want these on the military network anyway. I'd expect they would be completely isolated until activation, and then they would be using local connections rather than the connections used for actual military base communications.
Even then, military bases would not be necessary for physical distribution throughout the world. Simply have equipment in various countries connected to local networks (probably at network hubs in friendly nations, but any sort of high bandwidth connection would probably suffice). This distributed system could have the ability to receive activation and execution commands from a separate secured military satellite connection.
If the military wanted to apply botnet-like force on the internet, it could do so at the physical layer with exponentially more powerful effect.
If the USA were to fight a foe dependent on computers & networking (unlikely, but for the sake of this example, let's pretend), the Rangers could drop a team of Delta operators at a physical switch somewhere near the foe. If it's an entire country, the physical attack would be on a switch in a neighboring country friendly to the US.
If the telecom operator of this network is friendly to the US government, control of the switch may be yielded to the military. If not, physical force is used to insert a box at the switch that asserts control on packets travelling through the switch.
Once this control is achieved, a botnet is puny compared to what can be done at a significant switch. All packets coming from all users can be re-routed to achieve a DoSS on a given target server, etc.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I used a carpet bomb to redecorate my dorm room. It violated the "weapon and facsimile weapon" prohibitions at my college, but it sure beat the crap out of the TILE floor.
I would recommend against carpet bombing hospitals, however. Fibrous carpet isn't as hygenic (it can't be sterilized), and the noise could startle elderly patients and those in comas.
Oh, wait. "M$ lulz."
Of course.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
Ok so, I want to defend my country, so I volunteer my pc for use by the military from time to time. Cool. If your pc happens to be the one that breaks the code, maybe it'll get a medal ? Now what if I volunteer all the pcs on the network at work, without telling anyone ? Is it still patriotic ? What if (sorry, when) cyberwars become crucial - will there be a draft ? Will I be forced to sign up a certain amount of bandwidth and cpu in times of 'war' ?
Seems like a hell of a way to kill two birds with one stone...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The article clearly states there is no need to compromise people's computers, so calling it a "botnet" is a bit of a buzzword offense (by the military? naw). A military distributed computing capability is pretty much inevitable, for only some of the reasons this article states.
Defending against a botnet dDOS attack is obviously not one of them. The Ciscos of the world are already working on solving this one, because (surprise) ISPs don't like to have their infrastructures dDOSed. But until it is fixed, it's a good cyber attack mechanism that might be able to do some good.
But again the article falters; launching a dDOS from af.mil would have limited effect because there are only so many perimeter entries (iirc, they are trying to reduce it to under 10?). A voluntary "botnet" of US computers (surely 10-20M patriotic americans would install it tomorrow; hell I might consider it if I thought it would keep out other bots) might work, but would require filtering all the dDOS traffic through our national gateways -- a bigger, but still critical chokepoint.
I think they really need to acquire foreign bandwidth, and there are basically two ways: buy it or steal it. Buying it might work, but it would be a challenge to purchase multi-megabit backbone connections at thousands of hosting centers around the world (hi, um, I'm from the US Military). Stealing it (via a true botnet) is ethically questionable, but you could take the altruistic approach and patch the poor guy's computer to make sure yours is the only compromise, also a good move competitively speaking.
This capability is only partially a defensive one. Obviously the ability to zap an hostile intruder at will would be sweet, but more likely they would want an offensive tool. The Internet is literally the lifeblood of today's terrorist organizations, and a dDOS capability might be the most effective way to quickly shut down recruiting sites before they gain the momentum they need to be effective. Of course, you'd just drive them further underground with more encryption and secrecy, but then it starts getting pretty hard to be a casual terrorist, which is pretty much exactly what you want to happen.
In my fictional/paranoid dreamscape, the military/IC has already collaborated with someone like Symantec or Google to ensure they have a trojan installed on hundreds of millions of computers -- just in case. Heck, that's why I just had to post something. I'm sure they're getting a kick out of this discussion!
Good rant, but that interpretation of 29(3) is wrong. Someone's actions flaunting the "purposes and principles" of the UN Human Rights treaty are not protected by said treaty. It does not state that they are no longer protected in all other actions/states of being: They still have human rights, it is just the defiant actions that are not protected. The right to, say, life would never be withheld under that clause unless living itself was "contrary to ...".
Let them just post the server's link to Slashdot.
So combine a government botnet (monitored, or not, by the "tech savvy" *snort* legislative and judicial branches of gov.), our executive branches willingness to violate individuals rights under the guise of "terrorist investigation", and the military's pledge to protect us from enemies "foreign and domestic" and you have an almost perfect recipe for ... well I don't know exactly, but I suspect us individuals won't be considered much.
Not to mention, the Articles of War prohibits you from shooting enemy infantry with a 9mm hollow point, but allows you to shoot them with a 30mm autocannon round.
Well, this goes far beyond the usual question about botnets on slashdot : "should forced updates be made through botnets ?". If militaries think that this is a military issue for them, then they should begin with this. They are not talking about protection against enemy strikes, but about the ability to make counter-strikes (which usually goes hand in hand with the ability to make first strikes). I would like to see military efforts to clean botnets. I don't really care about them having their own.
The only thing I want to be made clear is that I can erase any program running on my computer at any time.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
what makes me angry is when people who have no idea what theyre talking about throw around terms they dont understand OR people use terms to sensationalize situations because they know others dont fully understand them.
The term "botnet" generally implies the use of unwitting zombie hosts, but if you consider the term for what it is it is simply a network of remotely controllable bots, which is what were talking about here.
What we are talking about here is a US government sponsered cyberwarfare distributed system. Do you think this is the first one? But I suppose "Why America needs a cyberwarfare distributed system" just isnt as catchy in a subtitle.
From the Geneva Conventions: "In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives."
Of course, this is the Additional Protocol of 1977 which only a small number of rogue states have refused to ratify.
Sounds like an opportunity to create a "patriot plugin" for Boinc.
I personally prefer SETI, though.
ROFLMAO.....
Yet another clueless poster pointing a finger at the US for commiting war crimes. You people never cease to amaze me. I wish just once we wouldn't come to the aid of these countries. Let them rot and kill each other off. It doesn't matter WHAT we do or HOW we handle it, we end up being the bad guys. If you're going to smack the US down for bombing infrastructure in a freaking war, well you have to smack EVERY country that's been at war, both sides, since air power came to be. WTF man, it's a WAR. You freaking destroy the infrastructure because that's how you WIN. What you REALLY mean is you don't agree with the wars - stop hiding behind inane comments. This tells me you're a 'peace at any price' person and thus your opinions on the matter are irreleveant.
BTW, as far as Hezbollah is concerned - you want to talk about civilian damage. These guys fire 'rockets', which are really just long distance grenade throws with no guidance systems into CIVILIAN populated areas. WTF do you call that? They do this EVERYDAY. I don't give a SHIT what they declare. I'm not particularly pro Israel, but come ON. Get your head out of the sand - again, your statements show what you are.
EK
I have no problems with a military botnet as long as the computers hosting it are strictly voluntary. It seems to me that if the military infected everyone's machines without their knowledge it would be a violation of the third amendment: "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
My rights don't end where your feelings begin.
birth of skynet. be afraid. be very afraid.
Your interpretation doesn't fit with my understanding of the Geneva Conventions so I looked them up and started reading them. They very clearly do not agree with your rather inflammatory and anti-islamic statements. Amazing how an anti-islamic rant can get rated informative by stating poppycock and complaining that no one else plays by the rules. Anyone interested in what the Geneva Convention actually states should read it, not rely on some uninformed partisans "interpretation". You can google, or go to http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm or http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/365?OpenDocument
I just knew there was a catch to getting to play http://www.americasarmy.com/ for "free". Just brings a whole new meaning to "special forces"..
I have a suspicion: people working so hard to elaborate a 'legal' support that enable to kill civilians, but respecting Geneva conventions, have to be jews. Are you?
You feel the need to show all the massacres of the IDF as 'legitimate'.
Obviously, everything said was true. If you don't think so, your head must have been in the sand for the past 30 years.
There's an old saying... "Think before you develop.." The USAF needs to think more about security from a non-AI viewpoint. Creating a botnet would simply open the doors for more exploitation, not more security. Millions of little programs all reporting to the mothership. Centralization is security, not distribution.
First things first, a few definitions, and clarifications, which may not be accurate(as always):
1. United States Air Force(AF) Colonel Charles W. Williamson III, , staff judge advocate, Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency
2. The Colonel is applying an allegory of traditional, meatspace strategy and tactics into cyberspace (his fortress metaphor)
Now then, technical number arguments aside (the scale of military resources is unusually hard to determine), the proposal is based on a single, amazingly bad assumption: that the military networks are hooked up to the internet. It can be inferred from many articles, patents (see cryptome), etc. that the US Armed Forces uses a separate computer network for the majority of their computer processing needs. Even assuming that if he were to organize the computers with internet lines into a botnet, that botnet would probably be comparable in size to the majority of botnets (this is a shot in the dark, hope I'm right). It would be fairly easy for the military to move most of those computers to use civilian lines in their respective countries (so a german base housing this botnet would look like a german household). Barring the most specific of geo-lookup services, this would provide them with a easy way to bypass any but the most sophisticated of firewall rules (which would include aggressive monitoring of traffic).
Even so, the botnet would be fairly useless, as a ddos attack is only as useful as your enemies need for internet access. Whenever I'm under attack at home, I make a cup of coffee, and watch a movie. By the time I finish, it's usually over. Far more useful are the plans for EMP weapons designed to knock out the electrical infrastructure of a region (metal ribbons that are scattered all over the place right before acting as antennas). But the idle time of all military computers could easily overcome the processing power of folding@home. I'd put a good amount of money that that idle time is already being utilized to further strategic and tactical simulations, in addition to any number of more generic data processing applications. BOINC only scratches the surface.
SkyNet zohavaet vash mosk dumbs!!!
...and are just behaving like ants and dogs.
which makes stepping on ants and kicking dogs pointless, cruel and inhumane.
shouting at or kicking a dog for being a dog - for it being what it is, and for a dog being true to its nature - that's just... utterly dumb.