Cyberwar

Posted by: stak
Posted on: 2007-05-14 12:48:23

It appears as though war has evolved to the next level: the Internet. Estonia was attacked with massive DDoS attacks, which took down a number of government websites. Although they blame Russia, it's going to be pretty hard to prove that conclusively because DDoS attacks are inherently geographically distributed over a range of attackers. There may have been hosts in Russia that were part of the attack, but it's hard to tell if that's where the attack originated, or if those hosts were just part of a botnet controlled by somebody in some other country.

Seeing as how botnets can be hired to take down just about any website, it seems that evil villains with nefarious plots to take over the world are going to have a pretty easy time starting wars (or at least cyberwars). On the one hand, taking down a chunk of the Internet could be considered an act of war, since it basically boils down to destruction of a civilian (and possibly military) communication network. On the other hand, it's practically impossible to single out any one country as the source of the attack. It could just be a 10-year old kid in his parents' basement. Unless internet security is beefed up in a hurry, this problem could snowball out of control really fast.

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