Air Force Colonel Suggests Building Army of Computers for Cyberwarfare

An Air Force Colonel suggests building an army of computers to fight the nation's wars in cyberspace.

Hackers already infect personal computers with viruses that allow them to control computers for everything from sending spam e-mail to cyber attacks. In most cases, the owners of the infected computers do not even know their PCs have been turned into zombies.

According to the article, Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace, which appears in the Armed Forces Journal, Col. Charles Williamson III suggests creating a military computer army. He does not suggest infecting computers across the internet to be controlled by the Air Force, but rather harvesting the computers that the military already has and the computers that it is already planning on throwing away. Software would be loaded on the computers in order to place them under military control.

Harnessing the combined computing power of thousands of computers, even slower, older computers, under a central command would give the military a formidable weapon in cyberspace.

Col. Williamson suggests that the army of computers, called a botnet, could be used to create DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service ) attacks against cyber threats outside the jurisdiction of the United States and its allies because in most cases, there is little legal recourse for such assaults.
DoS attacks overwhelm a computer or network with a flood of information, rendering the targeted computers useless, and are a common hacker tactic. In some cases website owners are extorted for money under threat of a DDoS attack

The Air Force has already announced the creation of a Cyber Command that will monitor threats in cyberspace and try to protect United States interests, although most of the policies and tactics have not been made public. According to the Cyber Command website, the new command describes it mission as, "AFCYBER will prepare forces for use by national leaders but will not try to control all military cyberspace activities because that realm remains an inherently joint environment requiring the interdependent action of many military and civilian organizations."

Security officials are becoming increasingly more concerned with cyber security as more and more of the nation's infrastructure relies on computers to function and in many cases are connected to internet. The United States Military relies on computers for its command and control of forces around the world.
In April 2007, the European country of Estonia was crippled under a DDoS attack on the government and commercial computer networks. Estonia has the reputation of being the most wired country in Europe, but the attack rendered most government communications unavailable.