USAF Considers Creation of Military Botnet 440
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?"
We must defend ourselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm? (Score:5, Insightful)
A botnet is like a disease. Not a bomb. Deliberately infecting your own computers is a horrible idea.
The path... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wait What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:1, Insightful)
What makes you think they aren't?
Everyone said 'wow' when they made the stealth bomber public in '88, but they sat on it for eight years before telling anyone.
Which country would that be again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
And this is why the military never works with... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Historical Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:where can i get some (Score:1, Insightful)
Hoisted by their own petard! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hahaha... welcome to the digital cold war.
But can the US win? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:5, Insightful)
And it makes the civilian population a legitimate military target. A little like hiding the missiles in the churches.
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:3, Insightful)
If you linked up the FBI, CIA,and DHS windows computers you would have a pretty wide network. your not talking about a single point, your talking tens of thousands.
Don't be silly... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:We must defend ourselves (Score:4, Insightful)
However, most botnets are assembled from compromised computers belonging to people who lack the sophistication to properly secure them. That's a more complex issue - Maybe we go ahead and nuke their computers anyway, but it deserves more consideration than stomping on a hostile ant.
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But can the US win? (Score:3, Insightful)
What do I think of this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:2, Insightful)
Since Military Intelligence is an Oxymoron... (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Mod parent up. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Democracy and the volunteer Army (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Duck hunting with a grenade launcher (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:New laws (Score:5, Insightful)
You got a virus on your computer? Cry me a river.
Why would they need computers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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" [abc.net.au] on their cable.
tm
Re:We must defend ourselves (Score:5, Insightful)
And most (real, not the jingoist xenophobic crap that passes for it now) threats to national security are surrounded by innocent civilians who lack the "sophistication" (or are just scared sh*tless) to overthrow an opressive regime themselves.
Now, since we're not talking about injuring or killing people--just essentially jamming their net connection for a little while, and maybe messing up their computers--I'm much less concerned about "civilian casualties" of a botnet war. (That is, until the botnets send the robots to come kill us).
A hostile ant isn't biting you because it's mean, it's instinct since you've been perceived as a threat to the colony. Hostile antbites also don't result in millions of dollars lost when mission critical infrastructure is brought down.
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Historical Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
- American revolutionaries may have blended in among the civilian population while not fighting, but they did not hide behind the civilians while in the act of attacking. Modern terrorists often deliberately launch attacks from locations that are surrounded by civilians in the hope of incurring embarassing collateral damange when the target counter-attacks
- While many of the Colonial forces may have fought using irregular tactics, that is not the same as flaunting the customary laws of war. The vast majority of them obeyed the laws of armed conflict as they existed at that time (e.g., prisoners were treated humanely, not beheaded)
- While there are civilian casualties in all wars, there is a world of difference between inadvertently killing or maiming noncombatants and deliberately targeting them. Instances of either side in the American Revolution deliberately targeting civilians were few and far between; for modern terrorists, targeting civilians is the norm
Try not to let your political views get in the way of historical facts.
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Using bots in S.American countries (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Historical Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Just as the radical Muslims demonize the West, particularly Americans, and Jews, American rebels demonized sympathizers with the crown. There were acts of terror (keep in mind that without terrorism in New Jersey and the Carolinas, the rebels would likely have lost the war, due to Tory support), there was propaganda (some of which was truth, some of which was not).
As others have noted, history is written by the winners. If you read a lot about the American Revolution (what you learned in grade school/high school is mostly crap), you'll come to view it slightly differently... and realize that it has a lot in common with the radical Muslim position. They are angry of American cultural and economic hegemony... the American Revolution was very similar, though it added political hegemony to the mix. Since today, with Capitalism having conquered Democracy, economic hegemony == political hegemony, it's no surprise that the American Empire is resented.
All that said, I am not an apoligist for Muslim extremism -- but understanding it makes it easier to battle.
Re:I'm Suprised (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We must defend ourselves (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously, the counter-argument is "always back up your data" or "don't rely on computers so much" to which the follow-up is "if they didn't back it up, they got what they deserved." However, the same argument could be made of real-life incidents: "Never associate with [terrorists|the enemy]" and "if they didn't leave that town, they deserved to be bombed with the [terrorists|enemy]". Would that be an acceptable excuse? I don't think so.