Slashdot Mirror
Botnets As "eWMDs"
John Kelly writes "The current issue of Policy Review has a paper by an American computer scientist and the recent Permanent Undersecretary of Defense for Estonia. Drawing on the Estonian cyber attacks a year and a half ago, as well as other recent examples, they argue that botnets are the major problem. They propose that botnets should be designated as 'eWMDs' — electronic weapons of mass destruction. The paper also proposes a list of reforms that would help to limit the scale and impact of future botnet attacks, beginning with defining and outlawing spam, internationally." Many of the proposed solutions are common-sensical and won't be news to this audience, but it is interesting to see the botnet threat painted in such stark terms for readers of the Hoover Institution's Policy Review. For a more comprehensive overview of cyber-security threats, listen to NPR's interview with security experts on the occasion of the release of a new report, "Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency," which recommends creating a cyber-security czar reporting to the President.
WMD isn't about the actual history of attack. There hasn't been a nuke detonated in an offensive capacity since World War II, but that hasn't stopped them from being a preoccupation of defense strategy since then. It's about the fear. And the concept of hundreds of thousands of zombie computers attacking an institution without the proper defenses could be devastating, especially if that institution is critical to the public health/safety.
I bet this is a way to sneak in some more "general purpose" legislation on the net. There is going to be a strong push for that coming from the EU in the next months unfortunately.
I can see it now. Newlines in the papers as Iran is found harboring WMDs along with Syria and Pakistan. Equating NBC weapons with botnets is retarded on an incredible amount of levels.
Sadly, I'm always stumped by how far a language can be warped so that things are labeled in a desirable way by the authorities.
This has been happening since the ancient times and we haven't grown out of it. The athenian hegemony was named the athenian alliance, the enslavement of foreign countries by the Romans was called Pax Romana, and even now, he american goverment classifies botnets as eWMD's, every country in the world dubs their Ministry of Military as Ministry of Defence, and War will always be Peace in the Ministry of Love.
Great fear. Terror even. Terrorism! Danger! Danger! Threat level orange! All good citizens must immediately surrender their rights! We'll start by outlawing spam. But how can we enforce it? We need to verify all e-mail legitimacy! We'll do it with technology. What is needed is a massive database of all e-mails sent, which will be filtered to assure that no 1,000 of them are the same. After that we'll send it to the intended recipient. Of course we'll have to keep logs...
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Pretty soon we're going to need a czar czar to keep track of all the czars we've been willing into existence lately.
Yeah, maybe not a city, but think about what would happen if they took WoW offline for more than an hour. Oh the horror!
Actually, an attack consisting of several simultaneous bombs in several areas of a city, combined with a systematic botnet attack of the major hospitals of the same city sounds quite evil...
..all of those doctors would be unable to properly bill for their services. Oh, the humanity!