Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
DDOS -- Distributed Denial of Service -- is what's been hammering WikiLeaks the last couple of days.
That's when kajillions of requests for a server's webpage bombard a server, so much so that it can't distinguish between legitimate requests and other traffic. It's called a DDOS attack.
It's used as a blackmail tool ("I pwn 100,000 infected computers, and if I say "go," you'll be hit by 100,000 clients every single second of every day to your site. You'll stop making money. Pay me $100k, and I'll go away"). It's an approach that has generated the black market of viruses. Because if you've infected 1,000,000+ computers with a virus you can command ("hit acme.com every second from your always-on computer connection") then you can bring almost any server down.
Now, WikiLeaks, over the last few days, has been hit by a massive DDOS. Hunh? This is not blackmail as we've come to know it, nor is it something that "hackers" would do.
It means, I'm afraid, that our own governments have been putting viruses on our computers.
Please convince me otherwise.
Here's the off-the-cuff evidence:
Hackers (and crackers, too) love information freedom. The lore is replete with stories of nasty corporate strategies hijacked by freedom-loving hackers, who believe in open systems, transparent systems, and believe that more eyes make more bugs shallow. Sunshine is the best antibiotic. Crowdsourced conclusions must be based on valid information.
It's what the Web's optimal for. Assange is from that hacker background: believing that radical openness can transform society to the good.
But more to the point for this diary, why would any hacker -- ANY hacker worldwide worth respect -- participate in a DDOS attack on WikiLeaks?
I mean, really. No way.
Only an entity with secrets worth protecting would attack WikiLeaks.
If that's the case, then who, pray tell, would want to enact a massive DDOS attack on WikiLeaks, while on another front pressuring Amazon to stop letting them use their "cloud" to serve their data, and pressuring Domain Name Servers to remove wikileaks.org, wikileaks.com, and other names, from their central directory of servers?
Who would want to stop WikiLeaks from continuing their efforts?
Hackers? No.
The Russian cybermob? No.
The Asian cybermob? No.
The Australian cybermob? No.
The US cybermob? No.
No, really, no crime syndicate fits the bill.
Instead, there's only one entity that seems likely to rear back and launch a DDOS attack at WikiLeaks.
And if that's the case, then recognize one important point: a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service via directed webtraffic) attack presumes control of tens if not hundreds of thousands of computers remotely.
To make a DDOS attack work, I would have to have inserted a program that I could contact, on hundreds of thousands of computers. Programs that would know that I'd said "attack WikiLeaks.org." That were paying attention to some programmatic overlord.
That implies, to me, that either:
a) the US federal government has emplaced such software on every single government computer, or
b) the federal government has spread a virus to its citizens' computers, or
c) the US federal government has spread a virus to foreign citizens' computers, or
d) many governments worldwide have spread viruses to its citizens' computers, or
e) the federal government has a bank of faux webbrowsers, ready in a bunker, with 100,000 different IP addresses, waiting for just such an event.
What other explanations make sense? Please, convince me. I'm all ears.
If I follow the reality:
a) DDOS attacks perforce require huge numbers of machines to function
b) pre-existing software must exist, and be remotely controlled, to make any DDOS work
c) DDOS was used against WikiLeaks
d) there is no commercial reason for a DDOS against WikiLeaks
e) pre-existing software had to be implanted on unsuspecting computers, to enable a DDOS against WikiLeaks.
then I have to confront the implications:
a) a degree of intrusion that scares the virtual pants off of digital me.
Am I missing something?
Talk me down, please. This is a conspiracy scenario I don't want to see.