In a good follow-up to articles several weeks ago about cyber warfare, the NY Times has a lengthy piece about Estonia and the near shut down of its electronic services.
The bulk of the cyberassaults used a technique known as a distributed denial-of-service attack. By bombarding the country’s Web sites with data, attackers can clog not only the country’s servers, but also its routers and switches, the specialized devices that direct traffic on the network.
To magnify the assault, the hackers infiltrated computers around the world with software known as bots, and banded them together in networks to perform these incursions. The computers become unwitting foot soldiers, or “zombies,” in a cyberattack.
In one case, the attackers sent a single huge burst of data to measure the capacity of the network. Then, hours later, data from multiple sources flowed into the system, rapidly reaching the upper limit of the routers and switches.
There isn’t much an ordinary reader can do about these developments except to be aware that life can be slowed to a crawl for unspecified periods of time. Banks can close; gas stations can be unable to accept credit cards; transportation grids can go to manual. Don’t drive on empty and hide some cash. Keep good walking shoes in the trunk of your car. Elementary earth-quake preparedness is a good beginning. The effect on the infrastructure of cyber disruption is somewhat the same.
If you are a computer user you need to pay as much attention to its contents as you do to personal grooming. The “bots” referred to in the article are lurking on computers around the world. Ordinary good computer practices should keep you from being part of the assault but a significant portion of people I know aren’t so scrupulous. I’ll bet an hours worth of consulting that before too long it will be a misdemeanor if “bots” are found on your computer….