cyberwar: attack looks like this: electronic Pearl Harbor

1 FLAT EARTH SOCIETY

VETTED: peer reviewed:

CAIDA's map represents a flattened Earth, with cities positioned around the circle. Tracing the circumference clockwise corresponds to moving from east to west. Each square represents a data hub, which lines up on a spoke with the city in which it is registered. The closer to the center it lies, the more data it traffics.

2 SINOSNUB

The United States owns 74 percent of the 4 billion available Internet protocol (IP) addresses. China's stake amounts to little more than that of an American university. Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses.

3 YOU STILL WON'T GET TO HAWAII

Hubs in Honolulu—and all over the Pacific—connect to only a few other hubs, which means your data are highly unlikely to pass through the Aloha State.

4 RING AROUND THE NET

The concentric rings of squares near the perimeter result from CAIDA's mapping mechanism, which plots a hub's distance from the center according to how many connections it has.

5 BRING IT ON HOME

The farther from the center, the lonelier the hub. The squares closest to the circumference of the circle represent the Internet service providers, or ISPs, that connect home PCs to the Internet. When one of these goes down, customers have no other way to get online.

6 WELCOME TO SPAMALOT!

UUNet is one of the oldest and largest ISPs; it connects to more than 2,000 other hubs. It is also the most vulnerable to junk mail and hosts more spam-generating gangs than any other ISP.

7 CAN THE CENTER HOLD?

If a high-traffic hub goes down, the data will usually find another path. "There are shortcuts everywhere," says CAIDA's Brad Heffaker. If a packet can't find its way, it returns a discouraging message to the sender.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"UN-ABLE TO FIND SERVER"

For weeks, for everyone....

“electronic Pearl Harbor,”

Former White House
Cyber Security advisor, Richard Clarke, for example, observes:
“We, as a country, have put all of our eggs in one basket. The reason that we're successfully dominating the world economically and militarily is because of systems that we have designed, and rely upon, which are cyber-based. It's our Achilles heel. It's an overused phrase, but it's absolutely true. It could be that, in the future, people will look back on the American empire, the economic empire and the military empire, and say, “They didn't realize that they were building their whole empire on a fragile base. They had changed that base from brick and mortar to bits and bytes, and they never fortified it. Therefore, some enemy some day was able to come around and knock the whole empire over.


As stated at the outset, cyber warfare, involves units organized along nation-state boundaries, in offensive and defensive operations, using computers to attack other computers or networks through electronic means. In the future, if not already common practice, individual cyber warfare units will likely execute through the wires attacks against targets in a cooperative and simultaneous manner. The overall intent is to seek advantage over an adversary by
compromising the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of a computing device.29


False:
To recapitulate, the U.S. economy is becoming networked in a spiraling, complex fashion. This means that an adversary can obtain advantage by remotely accessing such networks through electronic means, compromising data integrity and undermining trust. In addition, according to security experts, trends in both dependency and connectivity overlap; convergence has made U.S. national information networks more vulnerable and therefore more attractive as targets of
cyber attack. As retired Colonel Marvin Leibstone of the Computer Security and Technological Studies Project aptly puts it, “the more content there is on the Internet, and thus more valuable the contents, the more incentive there is to crack it to dominate it. And, thus, the need grows for additional protective layers and for organizations to work alongside one another.”33 And the U.S.
National Intelligence Officer for Science and Technology observed in 2001:

The old studies don't even mention botnets, and now there are in effect botnets without hosts.
No zombie computers.

Our current method for accounting for actual botnets falls short of assessing the threat.

"compromising data integrity and undermining trust" isn't even necessary, by attacking the proper network hubs with enough dos attacks, could the Internet be shut down?

The capability is out there, we have seen dos attacks on individual
sites, same method, just Larger numbers, by several factors.

And Nation states have this ability.

If DOD is cut off from the WWW, what effect does that have on USA's defense?

Threat assessment:
Calculate the total number of bots, for ALL time, subtract those removed, killed.
Using only the number of active Bots misses the sleepers.
Total - removed or killed = more accurate estimate of threat.
Billions ?
G