It seems like the Iranian cyberactivist movement has marked the entrance of the term DDoS into our culture’s shared vocabulary. There’s a big DDoS attack going on right now, in fact: the Post has coverage (they’re among the targets), and I heard a piece about it this morning on NPR. Governments are among the victims. People are starting to notice that the agencies responsible for dealing with this stuff don’t have the power to do much more than write whitepapers. Governments are going to start doing things about it.
I think this will likely take two forms:
- Legislated standards for ISPs. In particular, I imagine we’ll see ports for IRC and SMTP, if not all non-http ports, move to a default-closed state. I’m not sure how you’ll opt into opening them, but SMS verification of an online request seems to be increasing in popularity (my bank does this; Google does, too, when you start to use their App Engine service). There’ll also likely be incentives or mandates put in place for things like server-side antivirus scanning of email attachments. The details matter quite a lot — the possibility of a corporate power-grab that constrains citizens’ ability to interact securely is real — but I think such attacks can be fought off, and the result will probably be a good thing on the whole.
- These ISP standards could conceivably get written into trade agreements, at which point a more politically interesting possibility will arise: the imposition of economic or network sanctions against nations judged to have an out-of-control internet. Is there a damaging DoS attack coming from South Korea? Is that country’s government judged not to have adequate standards in place to fight or prevent it? Cut ’em off the network, or throttle their traffic. There’s a constituency for this: the WIPO people would be only too happy to have this capability.
This opens up other interesting possibilities. For one thing, the mutually destructive nature of sanctions would become immediately clear to internet users in a way that isn’t always obvious in the comparatively sluggish realm of trade. And for another, online false flag operations would become a more serious concern. A hacker group could conceivably blackmail a small, cloutless nation under the threat of eliciting an international network crackdown.
It’ll be interesting (and no doubt horrifying) to see deep packet inspection debated on the House floor. I think we’re headed that way, though.
Oh yeah: let me plug this article, which is the more entertaining narrative about a DoS attack that I’ve come across.
