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?"

Comments

I'm Suprised

[zehaeva]

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?

Re:I'm Suprised

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

you risk having the CNC reverse engineered and the botnet might suddenly "belong" to someone else.

Only if you're stupid and use symmetric encryption. Such a problem would most certainly not manifest with a distributed public-key encrypted network. Obviously this is an area where even good organizations and intellient people have been known to have made utterly stupid mistakes.

But it is certainly possible to create an uncompromiseable botnet.

Actually, to be honest, I'm really surprised such a botnet doesn't exist already. Oh well, perhaps it's just one of the better hidden ones.

One thing bothers me about botnets though : they all seem to originate either in Russia or deep into China. Especially in China I find it very surprising that ip's closer to the command center of those botnets tend to trace deep inside China, and not to the coastal cities, where you'd expect the Chinese script kiddies to be.

So aren't we just kidding ourselves that other nations don't already have these ? Storm might very well be Putin's botnet.

Re:I'm Suprised

[bill_kress]

Doesn't the US government already have monitoring at the choke-point of virtually every ISP? Equipment that undoubtedly has the ability to generate any number of packets, spoofing any source...

Would that be enough?

where can i get some

[FudRucker]

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)...