Botnets Declared a National Security Threat

The federal government is starting to realize the real threats of botnets around the world. U.S. homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff speaking at the RSA conference said that the US government has launched a cyber security "Manhattan Project."

The US is realizing that online attacks can be a form of "devastating warfare", and equivalent in damage to "physical destruction of the worst kind."

The FBI is stepping up its efforts at taking down botnets. Their talk at the conference "Protecting the Homeland: Winning the Botnet Battle" tried to highlight some of the successes and also some of the challenges associated with this effort.

Botnets unknowingly take over user's computers. These zombie machines can include hundreds of thousands of computers that could rival the most menacing armies in the world. These armies have ways to hide their command centers making it easy for them to make millions from spam and credit card theft. These botnets can also be used to direct floods of traffic at a targeted sites in order to bring down a rivals, devastate financial markets, and take down vital services like electricity, and communication systems.

US officials cited the recent take down of Estonian newspaper and government websites by hackers. This form of warfare had temporarily crippled the country's infrastructure and caused mass confusion.

The US is taking note and bringing this threat the forefront. Talk alone will not be enough though. They need to start taking action which may include targeting individual zombie machines, enforcing strict Internet governance rules on ISPs and domain registrars and enforce rules that make it difficult for these criminals to flourish online. We may even see laws in the future that make it unlawful to operate a computer on the Internet without proper security measures in place (e.g. firewalls, anti-virus).

Technically it is not difficult to implement changes that could help reduce the number and size of botnets. The real challenges are political, educational, and social ones.

Edsor3

_____________________

If you enjoyed this posting please subscribe to our RSS feed or submit it to your favorite social networks.