Big Bad Beowulfs Again

[j at cnb.uam.es]

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"jok707s at mail.smsu.edu" <jok707s at mail.smsu.edu> wrote:

> Now my question is: would the computing power of a beowulf be helpful in the 
> preparation &/or the execution of such an attack?  Would the analysis of the 
> interconnected weaknesses of the individual networks on the Internet be the 
> kind of task that can be helped out by parallel computing?  If so, how much 
> and in what ways?  Would the actual launching of the attack be subject to the 
> same bandwidth limitations as a pure DOS attack?
> 
> Another question: has anyone actually wargamed this with one or more real 
> beowulf clusters?  Of course, we can't try out the global attack for real--but 
> has anyone simulated a small version?  Do we have *any* actual empirical data 
> on the potential harmful uses of beowulfs?  Has the NIPC tried anything like 
> this?  If anyone knows of any unclassified info on this, I'd appreciate it.

Sorry, but is this a troll or what? I can't really believe such silly
- -and pardon, no flame intended- questions are made seriously.

The very question implies the answer: First of all you need a lot of people
to gather info, dig and understand it, make connections among failures, find
new, creative ways to exploit their findings, implement and test them, and
finally launch their fully debugged, fail- & fool-proof system into action.

Now, leaving aside the "long gathering period" above, you need a hoard of 
extra-intelligent people who need to relay on bugs found by others, to 
understand and enhance them (?) and develop a new significant attack (??) 
during a long period of time (???) to use against machines unprotected 
against bugs found, published and fixed years ago (????). Or who may 
program machines to understand all internet protocols and implementations,
without access to sources for most of them, so the machine may integrate
all bugs into a "constructive" way to sinergize them.

And what are you expecting the good guys to be? Brainless, pennyless monkeys?
So they do not fix any bug that has been publicly known for years, nor do
they update their systems in years, nor do they buy any new system for
years that might already incorporate those bug-fixes? In a world where the
half life of a useful computer system is one-two years and decreasing?

Give me a break. Artificial intelligence is no substitute for absence of
Natural intelligence. Just as spell checking does not guarantee that what
you write is correct.

BTW, it wouldn't hurt you to stop believing in magic and actually thinking
about what you write before posting and trying to initiate an witch hunt
based on wild superstitions.

				j


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