With the current scope of how bots are running rampant, how can just one person control the attacks? One problem that I see with the “Kill Switch” concept is that if someone truly wanted to cripple our government via bot attacks, the kill switch would have exactly the desired effect. Because it would halt all traffic to the affected network.

I think the best approach of the Cyber Security Act of 2009 is funding training of America’s citizens about what bot attacks are and how to prevent them. If we imposed sanctions against corporations that fail to patch their system with reasonable due care, these funds can go to continuing education of future cyber investigators, watchdog organizations and contribute to lowering the cost of certified software to reduce the threat on a personal computer level. Also according to actonline.org, “The ‘Next Billion’ Internet Users may bring on the ‘Next Billion’ Bots.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that ICANN, manager of the Internet domain name system, is implementing internationalized domain names (IDNs). IDNs will help the next billion Internet users enter web addresses entirely in their native language and character sets. As part of this project, ICANN is encouraging users to test native character domain names in their browsers, email software, and other applications.

At the same time, ICANN and others should be warning new internet users against downloading any patches or new applications unless they are dealing with a trusted website and scanning for viruses and malware. Otherwise, ICANN is inviting the “next billion” users to download the “next billion” bots capable of generating spam, phishing fraud, and the kind of denial-of-service attacks that brought down Estonia’s internet.”

These next billion users, instead of perpetuating the problem can become part of the Army to fight Viruses, Spyware, malware, adware and the many bots, phishers and spammers that are currently plagueing the Internet. With this said, I still believe one person should not have the power to stop traffic. A committee of qualified individuals should be required to provide a corrective action scenario to the President and then and only then can the President have the switch flipped to turn off a portion of the Internet.

One fear I have is that if this power is abused or falls into the wrong hands then the attacker now has the ultimate power. Do you think that this scenario I possible and how can we prevent it from happening if we do not have checkpoint measures in place to prevent runaway power?

Reference:
ACT Organization – BOT Armies, What is the threat to US Cybersecurity, (2009). Retrieve September 16, 2009 from http://www.actonline.org/library/bot_armies.html

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/415077/turkish_cyber_terrorists_attack_the.html

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135406/Analysis_Was_North_Korea_behind_the_DDOS_attack_?source=rss_security