Today's New York Times editorial "How the Kremlin Harnesses the Internet" highlights another dimension - government censorship and intimidation - that goes beyond the denial of service (DoS) attack wars that have been waged over Wikileaks/Operation Payback and certain file sharing web sites during the past month or more.
The Wikileaks incidents focused on PayPal, VISA, Mastercard and other sites that shut off payment services for Wikileaks supporters. The fact that a disorganized group of supporters could knock out service to these sites is amazing, but consider how life would be if there was a real but non-violent threat from a nation state. And there are at least several dozen countries that could mount a credible attack.
A targeted DoS attack could take down GPS services, making navigation systems inoperable. It could disable banking communications, making credit card transactions or (as happened with the Wikileaks attacks) make verification impossible. One type of attack uses SMS messaging, which could render texting inoperable. (OK, maybe these attacks are not all bad.) Our daily routine would not be the same and he world economy would be seriously disrupted by even a brief outage of the Internet.
NPR had a segment today about the Estonian government, which has been the victim of DoS attacks in the past. Time has a related article: Estonia Considers a Nerd Draft to Staff Cyber Army. I think a volunteer group would be much more effective and motivated.
What would be even better is for service providers to care about denial of service attacks and demand that Infrastructure and networking products (like DNS) have built in denial of service attack protection. There are products with these features on the market today and they are less expensive than competing products with no protection.
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