Uh-Oh: USAF Wants Their Own Botnet, For Cyber-Warfare.
I can imagine it now: “Download USADefense 1.0,” patiotically displayed on a plethora of American Web sites, which would intrisnically turn a regular PC (even a junker), into a form of ammunition for the US Air Force to use on their Cyber-enemies. Well, that’s sort of what the government wants…
The USAF would like to possess the largest botnet on the Internet. The goal of having control of millions of PCs? Hand-to-hand geek combat on the Web in fashion that sounds like it was ripped from the scripts of The Matrix, War Games and Hackers — combined.
What makes a botnet so powerful? Botnets are composed of several thousand (to several million) hacked computers which contain software that remotely waits for commands that a nefarious script kiddie to run, pretty much anonymously. Today, botnets are usually used to push spam and junk on the Web, but the government sees this as a weapon of the future. (And they aren’t wrong.)
If the USAF was to follow through on this, a lot of questions would need to be addressed:
- Who controls the botnet?
- What disclosure will have to be made on attacks?
- Which machines will be used in the botnet?
- …Will it consist of civilian volunteers (which brings a whole other debate about liability and privacy…)?
It’s always been a dream of mine to work in a governement-operated Internet “Black-Ops” control room taking down child molestors, supporting national espionage and being leet with a .mil hostname. Well, if this ever did get moving, my dream may be one step closer.
That said, I still don’t entirely support a botnet sponsored by the government; I mean there are other ways to engage enemies on the Web. And no, Rickrolling is not one of them.
[Via Slashdot]
Well, it’s the military so even it isn’t laughably ineffective it will be delayed for years, suffer countless budget restructurings and have Three Stooges-like mismanagement at the hands of a poorly equipped and under-trained staff that’s either half the size it needs to be or three times bigger than necessary. In the end, it will be farmed out on a no-bid contract to a private firm owned by the nephew of a Congressman at eight times the original cost estimates.
Seriously, it’s one of life’s comforting miracles that anything gets done at all when it comes to the mixing of the military and computers. I’ve seen exercises involving entire wings of aircraft, squadrons of ships, and tens of thousands of men from four countries nearly grind to a halt because everything was on a bunch of Zip disks that decided to quit working. This was less than 7 years ago and in what was at the time one of the largest and most “technologically advanced” command centers on the planet.
Remember the incident in 2001 when a Chinese plane crashed into one of ours? At the time those of us at my command were preparing for the worst- that situation was handled on Pentium II’s with 5-year old floppies that were wiped after each use.
I’d bet that in that building even today are the same 1960’s locking file cabinets filled to the brim with 3.5″ & 5.25″ floppies, tape cassettes, and honest-to-God punch cards that still contain the worst-case-scenario World War 3 directives/procedures/planning that were there when I was, and when the guy who trained me was, and the guy who trained him and…
Also should point out that even back then all the heavy-duty computing for modeling, etc was done by Booz-Allen and other contractors.
I remember the Click of Death from Zip Disks. Oh, the memories of reliable data storage.
I didn’t know the USAF was all that mis-managed; but what isn’t these days?
Well, to be fair to the USAF, it was a joint command, so everything was lowest common denominator- meaning the apathy/laziness of the Navy, IQ of the Army, old/broken equipment of the Marines, and don’t-take-it-too-seriously attitude of the Air Force.
Plus it was at the tail end/aftermath of 8 years of the “do more with less” doctrine of the Clinton administration… yeah.
You’re right about the Click of Death- more times than I care to remember there would be a group of field-grade officers standing at my desk when the disk was inserted, leaning closer and closer… listening… and then CLICK! Followed by much profanity.
Good times.