U.S. reveals plans to hit back at cyberthreats

Found on CNet News on Thursday, 03 April 2008
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The U.S. Air Force Cyber Command is developing capabilities to inflict denial of service, confidential data loss, data manipulation, and system integrity loss on its adversaries, and to combine these with physical attacks, according to a senior U.S. general.

"Terrorists and criminals are doing the same thing. We depend so heavily as a military on the use of cyber, we have to be cautious about it," Elder said. "Cyber gives us a huge advantage, but adversaries look at our capabilities and see areas they can undermine. We need to protect our asymmetric advantage--on the one hand by having people further exploit cyber, and on the other by having mission assurance."

"We're trying to move away from clandestine operations. We're looking for real physics--a bigger bang resulting in collateral damage."

Elder sounds really like some guy from one of those old "hacker" movies. dDoS isn't exactly legal, and ISPs won't be happy about network storms either. To attack an enemy network the US military will need random access points, or they would be too easy to stop simply by blocking all IP ranges assigned to the military. So, they would basically need a large herd of zombies; just like every spammer needs a botnet. But then they have already proven that their plans do work; although they only succeeded to nuke their own data or lose unencrypted laptops so far. And on a side note, Elder should look up "cyber" in an urban dictionary; it gives his statements and interesting and funny twist.