Today the Santa Maria Times posted an article about Cyber Warfare, and they even called it a new cold war. Perhaps they are luring people to their website with their sensationally article, because I do not think we are in a new cold war… yet.
Last weeks we have heard of reports of DoS attacks on several US government websites and South-Korea government websites. But there is absolutely no prove that these attacks have been organised by country Cyber warfare agencies from for example Russia or China although a lot of PC’s were located in these countries.
I think it is pretty clear why a lot of DoS involved PC’s where located there. These countries are compared to the western civilisation relatively poor, but they do have PC’s. My guess is that these people do not have money for , or do not want to spend it at, legal software and thus are vulnerable because they do not get (sufficient) updates.
Some investigation on my part supports this: according to statistics at statcounter.com, the windows XP usage is 92% in china, and according to this article 80% of all software in China is pirated .
These machine are an easy target for groups of hackers who want to form a botnet and can then be used to perform the DoS attack. Of course, those hackers could be in service of some government, but I highly doubt that.
If I would be some cyber warfare minister I would upgrade all internet lines to 10 MB/s of all departments in my country and all embasies abroad, get me some servers in data centers abroad so I could tunnel traffic through them and develope an application that should run as a service on every machine in that department.
Why would a country do all effort to get ( and maintain ) a botnet if it already has all necessary means?
Of course, for more covert operations you would like to have a botnet because it is less easy to trace, but for the rest: In a real war you also know who you are up against, so why not in cyberwar?