Botnets

USAF Col. Charles W. Williamson III has proposed a plan for a massive military-controlled botnet that could be used to launch attacks at hostile networks. His vision involves turning otherwise unusable machines into a powerful cyber-weapon, stripping them down to the bare essentials and turning them onto aggressors.

In his own words:
"America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic."

In Col. Charles W. Williamson III's plan, the hard drives of the military botnet machines would be removed in order to conserve power and create a more environmentally-friendly weapon. Does it sound like a good idea? Think about it carefully and then consider the following.

The botnets that are used in attacks on government networks tend to be comprised of hijacked computers belonging to regular folks like you or me. It is our computers that the good Colonel would like to render into hunks of metal and plastic, not those of some aggressive foreign state or tangible adversary. [Armed Forces Journal via The Register]