Digital press gangs threaten us all

Recent DDoS attacks highlight how our PCs are hijacked and used for criminal activity. John Hillman reflects on how this bears a striking resemblance to a much older activity.

For a small country Britain certainly made its mark on the world with an Empire that covered 13,000,000 square miles and governed the lives of almost 500,000,000 people.

Much of its success was attributed to the Royal Navy’s ability to control the oceans, which in turn owed its success to some pretty bleak recruitment practices, such as the notorious tradition of Impressment.

Marauding thugs known as Press Gangs would stalk the taverns and church courtyards of England looking for young men of fighting age to drag away and send off to sea, where they were forced to fight for King and country; this practice is now being repeated digitally with our modest home PCs.

Just as one of our ancestors may have been dragged away kicking and screaming to do the bidding of great powers, in order to achieve objectives he neither understood nor cared about, so we have a new breed of digital thug in the employment of shady powers acting as the modern equivalent.

They take over millions of PCs around the world and force them to become unwilling soldiers in the never ending international power struggle between the collective bands of lunatics that run our countries.

Botnets are networks of millions of PCs that have been hijacked in this way; yours could even be one of them. Once your PC is incorporated into the system it joins the ranked masses which then launch attacks on carefully chosen targets.

The attack itself is a simple request for information or attempt to access the site, but when over one million computers try and do this at the same time the targeted site simply crashes under the strain as it tries to handle the huge barrage of data.

This is what a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is. So far we have seen them used against Government infrastructure from Estonia to South Korea and just last week they brought down Twitter and Facebook, in what many think was an attack tied up with the political problems in the Caucuses.

Good protection software remains the best solution for individuals like you and me. Most of us look on our sleek and attractive home PCs as a member of the family; do we really want them forcibly enlisted in the faceless cyber-armies of the world?

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Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London