“Denial-of-service attacks are considered violations of the Internet Architecture Board‘s Internet proper use policy, and also violate the acceptable use policies of virtually all Internet service providers. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.” – Wikipedia

“Distributed Denial of Service” attacks on computer networks is as old as online gambling and fairly easily ‘fixed’ by wiping the commonly used ‘Trojan’ viruses programmed to saturate the target server with massive amounts of  communications ‘requests’ over a very short period of time or otherwise interfere with normal lines of communication to the point where the server slows down and ordinary traffic becomes gridlocked.

The server then usually has to reset. – Tom Dennen

Antifascist Calling - By Tom Burghardt

In 2008, the Armed Forces Journal published a prescient piece by Colonel Charles W. Williamson III, a staff judge advocate with the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, the National Security Agency listening post focused on intercepting communications from Latin America, the Middle East and Europe.

  Titled “Carpet bombing in cyberspace,” Col. Williamson wrote that “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. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack.”

While Williamson’s treatise was fanciful (a DDoS attack can’t bring down an opponent’s military forces, or for that matter a society’s infrastructure), he had hit upon a theme which Air Force researchers had been working towards since the 1980s: the development of software-based weapons that can be “fired” at an adversary, potentially as lethal as a bomb dropped from 30,000 feet.

Two years later, evidence emerged that US and Israeli code warriors did something far more damaging.

Rather than deploying an “af.mil” botnet against Iran’s civilian nuclear infrastructure at Natanz, they unleashed a destructive digital worm, Stuxnet. In the largest and most sophisticated attack to date, more than 1,000 centrifuges were sent spinning out of control, “no more useful” to Iranian physicists “than hunks of metal and plastic.”

A line had been crossed, and by the time security experts sorted things out, they learned that Stuxnet and its cousins, Duqu, Flame and Gauss, were the most complex pieces of malware ever designed, the opening salvo in the cyberwar that has long-guided the fevered dreams of Pentagon planners.

‘Plan X’

Today, that destructive capability exists under the umbrella of US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), one which has the potential of holding the world hostage.

Last year the Pentagon allocated $80 million dollars to defense giant Lockheed Martin for ongoing work on the National Cyber Range (NCR), a top secret facility that designs and tests attack tools for the government.

Under terms of the five year contract, Lockheed Martin and niche malware developers have completed work on a test-bed housed in a “specially architected sensitive compartmented information facility with appropriate security protocols” that “emulates the public internet and other networks, and provides for the modeling of cyber attacks.”

Originally developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s geek squad, NCR has gone live and was transitioned last year to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, federal contracts uncovered by NextGov revealed.

As Antifascist Calling reported back in 2009, “NCR will potentially serve as a new and improved means to bring America’s rivals to their knees. Imagine the capacity for death and destruction implicit in a tool that can . . . cause an adversary’s chemical plant to suddenly release methyl isocynate (the Bhopal effect) on a sleeping city, or a nuclear power plant to go supercritical, releasing tens of billions of curies of radioactive death into the atmosphere?”

NextGov also reported that the “Pentagon is seeking technology to coordinate and bolster cyberattack capabilities through a funding experiment called ‘Plan X,’ contractdocuments indicate.”

A notice from DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) informs us that “Plan X is a foundational cyberwarfare program to develop platforms for the Department of Defense to plan for, conduct, and assess cyberwarfare in a manner similar to kinetic warfare. Towards this end the program will bridge cyber communities of interest from academe, to the defense industrial base, to the commercial tech industry, to user-experience experts.” (emphasis added)

Although DARPA claims “Plan X will not develop cyber offensive technologies or effects,” the program’s Broad Agency Announcement, DARPA-BAA-13-02: Foundational Cyberwarfare (Plan X), explicitly states: “Plan X will conduct novel research into the nature of cyberwarfare and support development of fundamental strategies needed to dominate the cyber battlespace. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.”

The document also gives notice that DARPA will build “an end-to-end system that enables the military to understand, plan, and manage cyberwarfare in real-time” as an “open platform architecture for integration with government and industry technologies.”

The Military & Aerospace Electronics web site reported that DARPA has “chosen six companies so far to define ways of understanding, planning, and managing military cyber warfare operations in real-time, large-scale, and dynamic networks.”

Collectively worth some $74 million, beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse include “Data Tactics Corp. in McLean, Va.; Intific Inc. in Peckville Pa.; Raytheon SI Government Solutions in Arlington, Va.; Aptima Inc. in Woburn Mass.; Apogee Research LLC in McLean, Va.; and the Northrop Grumman Corp. Information Systems segment in McLean, Va.”

Additional confirmation of US government plans to militarize the internet were revealed in top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. Those documents show that the Pentagon’s goal of “dominating cyberspace” are one step closer to reality; a nightmare for privacy rights and global peace.

Such capabilities, long suspected by security experts in the wake of Stuxnet, are useful not only for blanket domestic surveillance and political espionage but can also reveal the deepest secrets held by commercial rivals or geostrategic opponents, opening them up to covert cyber attacks which will kill civilians if and when the US decides that critical infrastructure should be been switched off.

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