Security

Air Force Colonel Wants to Build a Military Botnet

While most government agencies are struggling to keep their computers out of the latest Russian botnets, Col. Charles W. Williamson III is proposing that the Air Force build its own zombie network, so it can launch distributed denial of service attacks on foreign enemies. In the most lunatic idea to come out of the military […]

While most government agencies are struggling to keep their computers out of the latest Russian botnets, Col. Charles W. Williamson III is proposing that the Air Force build its own zombie network, so it can launch distributed denial of service attacks on foreign enemies.

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In the most lunatic idea to come out of the military since the gay bomb, Williamson writes in the Armed Force Journal that the Air Force should deliberately install DDoS code on its unclassified computers, as well as civilian government machines. He even wants to rescue old machines from the junk bin to enlist in the .mil botnet army.

The U.S. would not, and need not, infect unwitting computers as zombies. We can build enough power over time from our own resources.

Rob Kaufman, of the Air Force Information Operations Center, suggests mounting botnet code on the Air Force’s high-speed intrusion-detection systems. Defensively, that allows a quick response by directly linking our counterattack to the system that detects an incoming attack. The systems also have enough processing speed and communication capacity to handle large amounts of traffic.

Next, in what is truly the most inventive part of this concept, Lt. Chris Tollinger of the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency envisions continually capturing the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find. Even though those computers may no longer be sufficiently powerful to work for our people, individual machines need not be cutting-edge because the network as a whole can create massive power.

After that, the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines.

Brilliant! The best defensive minds in the country want to build a massive distributed computing system to do nothing but pump crap into the internet. The article talks about carefully targeting attackers' machines, but this ignores all the intermediate networks between the Air Force and the target, which will have to contend with a flood of garbage packets whenever some cyber Dr. Strangelove decides to go nuclear.

What's next? Air Force 4-1-9 scams? Dot mil phishing attacks? The most disappointing thing about this irresponsible proposal is the tacit admission that our elite cyber warriors can't actually break into an enemy's computer, instead resorting to a brute force attack designed by web defacement script kiddies eight years ago when Apache servers got too hard to hack directly.

Update:

Reader A.E. Mouse says,

You all obviously don't really know anything about cyberwarfare. Including you Kevin. Having this type of capability is essential to IW [infowar] operations. Whether or not we actually need a "botnet" to do it is inconsequential. DDoS attacks can be very useful when used in a coordinated IW attack on enemy communications and network infrastructure.

In addition our relatively unsophisticated enemies have this capability. DDoS, while admittedly juvenile and "last resort", can be an effective tool. The reciprocity doctrine here applies. If the enemy has one, we need one too, a bigger one. The internet is a new battleground. All weapon types are on the table.

I'm sure that DDoS attacks could be useful to the military under certain circumstances. So could sending our enemies a bunch of unwanted magazine subscriptions, or ordering them dozens of pizzas with anchovies and pineapple (blech). But adults don't do that sort of thing.

The internet is a community venture, and DDoS is vandalism against the community. There's no such thing as pinpoint targeting in a DDoS attack; innocent civilian infrastructure is impacted every time.

Basically, Col. Williamson has noticed that there are bad guys in the swimming pool, and his solution is to piss in their general direction. That's the kind of behavior that rightly gets you kicked out of the pool and sent home for the summer.

(Via Slashdot)

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