Reuven Cohen has theorized on his Elastic Vapor blog that cloud computing technology could give rise to a new way to covertly communicate. It's called a "dark cloud" and Cohen points out these virtual meeting places could be used for criminal activity, file sharing, or cooridinated botnet offensives.
Cohen describes the dark cloud as this generation's version of the Darknet, a term applied to networks which were able to receive data from ARPANET (an ancestor of today's Web), but couldn't be seen or contacted in return. Cohen notes:
Recently there has been a resurgence in interest of the darknet ranging from the more unsavory such as P2P filesharing and botnets as well as more mainstream usages such as inter-government information sharing, bandwidth alliances or even offensive military botnets.
He goes on to describe a private computing alliance in which members could cooridinate resources in a cloud environment to either share data or accomplish a specific goal together. All of this alliance-forming, however, would not be publically viewable on the Internet. A similar idea was proposed by Col. Charles W. Williamson III in the Armed Forces Journal, stating that the U.S. needs a military "botnet" as he calls it to "carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack."
Does the idea of the military and private corporations having secured shared networks off the Internet grid sound disturbingly familiar? Anyone who's read William Gibson's novels would think so, right down to his description of "black ice" for the security surrounding the walled-off corporate areas online. Do we want corporations banding together to form alliances that can't be seen by any customers, competitors, or government regulators? Should we be concerned about the potential for the very criminals everyone is determined to avoid using the same technology themselves, moving on to set up another dark cloud without ever being detected?
Cohen's dark clouds could be used for everything from a seemingly innocuous defense from online attacks to more insidious uses that could violate laws, including customer privacy. He poses the question anyone should ask when confronted with the idea of such a weapon: "What are the legal ramifications, and do they out weight the need to protect ourselves from criminals who can and will use these tactics against us?" Gibson's novels may be more on target for a vision of our future than we ever imagined.
Image by John Kerstholt. Used under the GNU Free Documentation license.
More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:
Post new comment