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.
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.
You hit the nail on the head!
A botnet's great strength is that it is dispersed. House it only on military computers and you cripple it. Put it "out there" in some form, though, and you risk having the CNC reverse engineered and the botnet might suddenly "belong" to someone else.
Bad idea.
Life is short: void the warranty.
"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."
...disease pathogens. Oh wait...
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Why would they need to install them on civilian PC's? The US Gov't, unlike a lot of botnet creators, has a hell of a lot of funding. They could just buy a bunch of computers specifically for the task.
Or, they could just take every computer that is upgraded/rotated out of a federal government facility and set it aside for this job.
Or the US Gov't could just add a program to all of their active computers that relinquishes their idle time to the botnet. Sort of a militant version of Folding@home. (Civilians could even opt into this one.)
Or they could do all of the above. They wouldn't need to touch a civilian PC to get a formidable botnet.
Star Pirates
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.
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
Patriotic Americans who allow the govt to install software on their machine to attack the enemy is all well and good...
And it makes the civilian population a legitimate military target. A little like hiding the missiles in the churches.
What?
Wouldn't it just be easier to "accidentally" anchor some navy ships in the wrong spot, and sever many of the connections to the area. We learned this last winter that you don't need to cut off areas, just make their working links so oversaturated that they are essentially worthless.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
The US military has bases all over the country, and even all over the world. Put 10-100 computers in at each military base to participate in the botnet, and you could probably have a pretty strong botnet.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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?
Oh, please. Having your HDD screwed with is not a human rights violation. The purpose of the Geneva convention was not to outlaw everything that can hurt you. It was conceived so that the slaughter of human beings on a massive scale would be conducted with some sort of decorum... like not chemically flaying people alive and making their eyes explode.
You got a virus on your computer? Cry me a river.
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
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Military botnets are a dumb idea. Botnets serve two main purposes.
1. DDoS
2. mail relays
The value of a DDoS network is proportional to the total bandwidth of syn packets it can send. Why would the military need to take over smaller hosts when they have direct access to routers high up on the backbone of the internet?
As for number 2, I doubt the military has much need for mail relays.
What they really need is not a botnet. They need a list of foreign machines that they can bounce attacks through. It's been shown that titan rain was using compromised machines in Korea when they pulled the data from Germany (whether titan rain is considered a military unit is still up in the air).
Disregarding all political and ethical concerns about such a project, looking just at the technical:
1) You have just made a military target for every would be hacker, script kiddie, federally funded cyber opp, etc... in the world to try to crack. Do you think China would just sit there and say "Eh, it's made by the US, it must be uncrackable, so we won't even bother". Of course not, they would set some serious resources aside to crack this thing.
2) WHEN it gets cracked, and it will get cracked, you have just handed off control of your military owned botnet to the attacker. Depending on the nature of the botnet, and its deployment, you may have just handed over access to hardware on your networks.
3) All security is vulnerable given a sufficient amount of time and money, and in this case it's not like people are going to be jumping up and down warning you that your security has been cracked (except perhaps a few MIT guys who are promptly arrested and shipped to GITMO as enemy cyber combatants). The only way to fight against this is constant development and deployment, continuous improvement and rotation ensuring minimal windows for any given attack vector. In addition to the pure strain on your development team such a challenge would present you also have the logistical nightmare of trying to keep all of your infected machines up to date, and the constant risk that every code change represents the opportunity for an untested bug to be released.
This is one huge stinking pile of BAD IDEA. If the military really wants access to such a thing, their best option would be to find an existing bot-net operator out of Russia, or a disgruntled Chinese hacker and purchase attack time off of their bot-nets.
Same reward, lower cost, lower risk, better option.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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?