Storming the Castle: DDos and Active Network Defenses

Lev Lafayette 2007

DDoS such as the Storm worm botnet, infecting an estimated 8% of all MS-Windows machines, now easily overpowers the world's top supercomputers in terms of potential instructions per second and is capable of taking entire nation states offline if used in a targetted attack. Using the metaphor of medieval castles and the development of effective siege warfare this paper questions the long-term effectiveness of concentrating on internal router and network security in favour of active network defenses.

About Lev Lafayette

Lev Lafayette is a sociologist by profession and a systems administrator by vocation. He is a doctoral candidate at the Ashworth Centre for Social Theory at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne and has an honours degree from Murdoch University in Politics, Philosophy and Sociology. He has worked for the Parliament of Victoria as a database administrator and trainer, and for East Timor's Ministry of Foreign Affairs as their ICT Advisor in their first year of independence and is currently employed at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC).