The War is Coming.

The War Is Coming

The first cyber-war will be big. For the longest time we have thought of cyber-war in terms of government agents launching digital attacks against an enemy country’s infrastructure. Perhaps it would be terrorists hacking into a government’s treasury, or digital mercenaries shutting down the power grid. The first cyber-war, however, will be nothing like that. It will involve governments only tangetially. And the heroes of this war will be the spammers.

With the recent closing of Blue Security Group, Eran Reshef, CEO of Blue Security said, “It’s clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don’t have the authority to start.” Reshef’s anti-spam company had been targetted by angry spammers who successfully attacked Blue Security and other major websites using a DDOS attack. Reshef’s statement was incredibly prescient, aside from being astute. There are companies with the authority to start a cyber-war, Verizon Communications, BellSouth, AT&T and SBC. This war will be a resource war, and it will be over Net Neutrality.

I know it it seems far fetched, perhaps tin-foil hattish that a true cyber-war would arise from these circumstances. However, the circumstances lend themselves to a full-blown resource war.

The privatization and rationing of what has to date been a neutral resource is a powerful foundation upon which resource wars erupt. The closest “real world” example we have to this is Bolivia’s “war” over water privatization http://www.democracyctr.org/waterwar/. What is important to note is that the greatest deterrent of war in these circumstances is fear. Activists have legitimate fear of their livelihood to take to the streets and protest or worse, to take up arms. This is simply not the case in a cyber resource war – the combatants are largely anonymous and unfettered. Their weapons are powerful, cheap, and purely digital.
Two sides will form in this fight, one of the Telcos and one of unsavory internet profiteers like spammers. The same people who love to fill your inbox with pharma advertisements and smut will vigorously defend their ability to do so, as was the case with Blue Security Group. We have every reason to believe that the instant their third-rate .infos and ccTLD sites slow down, or massive spam campaigns start to slow these individuals will retaliate. They will retaliate against the Telcos and the companies that patronize them. They will throw out everything in defense – DDOS attacks, spam attacks, Google Bowling, even hacking sites to peddle warez, smut, and pharma directly from the rich .Coms that have purchased top-tier bandwidth. They will not be the only ones fighting, though. Slowly, but surely, as users begin to feel the effects on their neighborhood blog, or their school district home page, or when reading the daily newspaper online, some will find tools like SpamVampire and turn them against the companies that are responsible. There will be collateral damage.

And the Telcos will fight back the same as the RIAA. There will be lawsuits, bans, restrictions, filters, and everything else to protect their precious billion-dollar scheme. There will be massive ad campaigns to defend their actions. There will be counter-attacks that block the “zombie” computers that are really mom and pop’s PC that still works otherwise. There will be more collateral damage.

At some point, one of two things will happen. The government will step in and sign a Net Neutrality agreement. Or, the Telcos will post a statement to their sites saying something like this… “Our users never signed up for this kind of thing.”, the same justification that Reshef is using to close Blue Security’s spam-prevention doors. The Telcos will not win this war. If there is anything we know, it is that the Internet is far greater than the sum of its parts. It is the one venue in this world where money does not guarantee victory.

There is really only one entity that can prevent this. One entity that can see through the dollar signs and bottom lines of Telcos, and that is the U.S. Congress. A Net Neutrality law would prevent all of this. Otherwise, it is time to get prepared.

The war is coming – where do you stand?

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