Botnets = Dirty Bomb?

Raise your hand if you understand computer security well enough to comprehend how a massive online attack shutting down our communications and financial networks might work. Anyone? Anyone at all? Perfect, then that's the right claim for the next round of fear-mongering.

It's also reportedly just the first step in having the nation's most powerful spy agency begin to take over information security responsibility for large chunks of the net. In January, President Bush signed an order, National Security Presidential Directive 54, that begins that process. The details are murky, since the order itself is classified.

To sell the plan to the private sector, Chertoff and other officials will likely talk about Chinese hackers infiltrating the military's most secure unclassified servers, and perhaps offer another iteration of the claim that a serious computer attack against the United States would deal an economic blow that makes the September 11 terrorist attack look like a parking ticket.

Beyond the hype, of course, there are some serious threats that will go under the microscope at RSA -- most prominently the pernicious influence of botnets, the large collections of compromised Windows machines that are used for online crime ranging from spam to phishing. The largest of these are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of computers strong.

But in keeping with the tone set by the United States, botnets are being recast as the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Consider the title of one panel on the malware: "Protecting the Homeland: How to Win the BotNet Battle?"

THREAT LEVEL's been on this for a little while. It seems that the fear from the War on Terror is wearing off, and we need a new threat so that we can entrust the government with more spying powers over Americans. That's really what is always comes down to isn't it?

The sad thing, as the post mentions, is that there are real security issues that will be overlooked by our government in their quest for even more sweeping powers. Sound familiar?

Let's give this an Orwell rating of 3, for inventing a new war, and attempting to further implement Big Brother directly. A 4 rating would have to be a successful sweeping change, and I'm not gonna bother with rating an event like the creation of Newspeak - that would be beyond 4. I'll give a full rationale for the ratings soon.