Abstract
Malware and criminal operations performed by botnets on the Internet not only pose a
new threat, but also point to our increasing reliance upon a new form of machinic
agency, which I call the webbot assemblage. Whereas news media coverage of its
operations considers only their human aspects, mostly in relation to crime and
cyberterrorism, Daniel Suarez's recent novel Daemon
provides a suggestive glimpse into how, in a webbot assemblage, new forms of human
and machinic agency are complexly intricated. The significance of this assemblage
becomes further evident when it is considered in relation to how the Internet is
increasingly perceived: no longer as a neutral medium but as an ecosystem defined by
netwar, software arms races, and the possible evolution of “low”
forms of artificial life.
Introduction
In recent years, sophisticated new forms of cybercrime and cyber warfare have
displaced spam, pornography, and vandalistic viruses as the most visible threats from
the Internet's “dark” underside.
[1] As early as 2003 and
increasingly from 2004 to the present, the primary use of computer viruses and worms
has been as malware, which is used to break into and capture networked machines and
data systems for specifically criminal, money-making purposes, or for politically
subversive or destructive ends. Sometimes these subversive actions have taken a
positive political turn, as when they participate in the ongoing efforts to maintain
free and open access to the exchange of information, or to expose the secret and
illegal actions of surveillance, whether by state or private data-mining agencies.
The hacktivists' attacks against companies like PayPal which tried to weaken or end
financial support for WikiLeaks in the wake of its release of diplomatic cables was
one spectacular instance. Stuxnet, the worm that penetrated and corrupted the
computer system controlling the centrifuges of the Iranian nuclear enrichment
program, provides a comparably dramatic example of cyber warfare.
[2] Shortly after reports of Stuxnet appeared in the
news media, the former anti-terrorist security advisor for Presidents George W. Bush
and Bill Clinton, Richard A. Clarke, published
Cyber War
(2010), a book detailing the increasing vulnerability of the American government,
military, and large corporations to cyber attacks launched by State hackers working
for foreign governments. But in fact, news reports of cyber war have generally been
less frequent, and mainly of interest to Internet security experts. The vast majority
of related news media stories for the past six or seven years concern the exploits of
cybercriminals, and have focused on Distributed Denial of Service attacks, instances
of extortion, identity theft, and the astronomical sums of money invested in Internet
security and extracted by mafia-supported hackers. These reports have been so
visible, in fact, that President Obama felt compelled to give a public speech about
cyber threats and the costs of cybercrime early in his presidency.
[3]
While certainly justified — indeed, to ignore Internet security and the dangers of
malware would be foolish — this media attention is concerned almost exclusively with
“the human face” of a vast technological assemblage whose machinic operations
mostly remain obscure. Specifically, our greatly increased dependency on the Internet
necessarily also means our increased dependency upon a variety of “bots”
(software robots) and intelligent agent software more generally. Much of what happens
on the Internet is enabled or carried out by web bots, spiders, screen scrapers, and
many quasi-autonomous software systems. Although essential to the functioning of our
current information society, the new forms of machinic agency that bots instantiate
have received very little critical attention outside the circles of Internet security
and data mining professionals. Here, I will examine what I call the webbot assemblage
from multiple, partially overlapping perspectives – first, new malware and Internet
security, second, a contemporary cyber-thriller in which a webbot assemblage figures
centrally, and third, the dynamically changing nature of the Internet itself. My aim
is to sketch a new understanding of the evolving and complex imbrication of human and
machinic agency that the Internet is bringing about. Indeed, the developing
technology of the webbot assemblage is inseparable from many of the dynamical changes
we have witnessed in the Internet itself over the past decade or so, as it has
acquired the traits of an ecosystem defined by netwar, software arms races, and the
possible evolution of “low,” barely intelligent forms of artificial life.
Bots on the Net
Unlike the computer voices on the telephone with which we frequently interact, most
bot activity remains invisible. In eerie silence, countless numbers of bots
tirelessly search for, record, retrieve, sift through, and act upon the
ever-enlarging masses of data without which our contemporary high-tech world could
not function. While most of this activity occurs on the Internet, it is instigated by
and purportedly serves the interests of people at the “front-end,” in offices
and at desktops everywhere. Much of financial management, for example, is automated
by bots, which more and more often determine whether or not we get a loan or
mortgage. Bots scan x-rays and MRIs, function as players in online games and as
purchasing agents for brokerage houses. They operate and monitor surveillance cameras
all over the globe, as unblinking eyes that watch and record many of our activities —
our movements, spending habits, commercial transactions, and health records — which
other bots in turn analyze for patterns which are then sold on the market. The
massive increase in cell phone and e-mail surveillance since 9/11 would not be
possible without bots. In fact, the Internet itself, which we commonly think of as a
network of people using machines, is increasingly used for machine-to-machine
exchange, specifically Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). In sum, Internet bots now
automate a widening range and number of activities that until recently only humans
could perform.
Initially, bots were a basic tool for network maintenance and data management. But
with the Internet's accelerated use and expansion in the late 1990s, bots were
developed that could search the Web, download pages or selected bodies of information
following refined search criteria, and then bundle it neatly in a file for the human
user.
[4] This type of bot, usually called a web crawler,
systematically visits web pages, retrieves content, extracts URLs to other relevant
links, and then in turn visits those links. In addition to data mining, web crawlers
are often used to find and repair broken links. But they can also be used to retrieve
user information, including usernames and passwords, as well as security information
about the user’s machine or system. Consequently, bots have also become a primary
means for malicious and criminal exploits, the most threatening of which is their
collective formation in criminal “botnets.”
In its simplest form, a botnet is an army of compromised computers that takes orders
from a “botherder.” In
Botnets: The Killer Web App,
Craig Schiller et al explain further: “The software that creates and manages
a botnet makes this threat much more than the previous generation of malicious
code. It is not just a virus; it is a virus of viruses. The botnet is modular —
one module exploits the vulnerabilities it finds to gain control over its
target. It then downloads another module that protects the new bot by stopping
antivirus software and firewalls; the third module may begin scanning for other
vulnerable systems”
[
Schiller et al 2007, 3]. To start this process, a hacker first tricks the user into installing a root
kit that gives him (they are still mostly males) complete control over the user’s
machine. Several vectors are used to install such malware: getting the user to open a
contaminated email or to download software from a compromised website are the most
frequent. To penetrate databases storing credit card and personal information of
large numbers of people, hackers often deploy software tools to probe for open or
unprotected ports through which the malware is downloaded directly.
[5] With
malware installed, the hacker or botherder — completely unknown to the user — can use
the compromised machine or “zombie” to send waves of spam or pornography, or
else enslave it in huge botnets that are mobilized in Distributed Denial of Service
(DDoS) attacks, which overload and crash the target website, rendering it
inaccessible. Initially such attacks were directed against online gambling sites and
large corporate web sites, but more recently all sorts of organizations and even
governments have been targeted. In
Fatal System Error
[
Menn 2010], Joseph Menn provides many detailed examples of how DDoS
attacks have been used for criminal extortion by mafia-like organizations in Eastern
Europe and Russia. As Menn shows, these highly skilled and well-paid criminal hackers
rely on networks of semi-secret websites that offer malware and services like
pay-for-use botnets. Such “darknets” constitute an extensive network of
underground sites used to develop and market the essential tools of the trade.
One significant side effect of these DDoS attacks has been to make more visible both
the power of bots and our greatly increased dependency upon them. The problem of
countering the threats they pose will be considered later; here let it suffice to
note that with the constant development of Internet security measures we are
witnessing an escalation of the “malware wars,” which are usually represented as
an evolving software arms race between “the good guys and the bad guys,” with
the future of the Internet at stake. These developments — and foremost the greatly
increased sophistication of the tools that now make up criminal webbot assemblages —
indicate an important historical shift. This is evident in the large numbers of
criminal hackers, their complex organization, and often the concerted nature of their
actions, which sharply contrast with the practices of the preceding epoch, when only
small numbers of relatively isolated hackers wrote and launched computer viruses for
vandalistic, anti-social motives or simply to experiment with software “in the
wild.”
This historical shift to large criminal organizations and thus to a well-financed
criminal hacker class whose motivation is purely monetary or economic is not the
whole picture, however. Many recent events suggest that the line between the mafia
hacker and the State-supported hacker is becoming blurred. In his book, Inside
Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld, Jeffrey Carr
cites a number of relevant incidents. When Russia attacked Chechnya in 2002, for
example, it used some of the same criminal organizations just mentioned to bring down
Chechnyan opposition websites. In 2001, when Chinese and American military aircraft
collided over the China Sea, thousands of Chinese hackers spontaneously launched a
“counter cyber-offensive” against US aggression. As a result, as Carr puts
it, “non-State hackers [have become] a
protected asset”
[
Carr 2010, 29]. Yet, since the evidence suggests that many nation-states besides China and
Russia not only tolerate but actively support and even provide university or
technical training for hacker groups, a clear and constant distinction between state
and non-state hacker can no longer be maintained. Perhaps a more appropriate
framework could be extrapolated from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of
“nomad war machines,” which, they theorize, have always existed apart from
but can also be appropriated by a State apparatus.
[6] In many of the instances cited by
Carr and Clarke, malware and rootkits functioning in webbot assemblages have clearly
been weaponized for cyber warfare by nation states.
The Stuxnet worm provides a highly instructive example. Its apparent purpose was
simple: to slow down Iran's production of high-grade uranium by destroying the
functionality of its centrifuge machines. However, Stuxnet represents a striking leap
forward in complexity and functional design. Based on a rootkit and multi-functional
set of software modules much like the criminal botnet assemblage described earlier,
it adds a large array of components to increase its chances of success — for example,
it exploits several “zero-day” Windows vulnerabilities (i.e. vulnerabilities
still largely unknown to software developers and for which no security fix has yet
been issued by vendors), it increases the number of possible infection paths,
includes new antivirus evasion techniques and two forged digital signatures, and it
can be easily updated and possesses a command and control interface.
[7] Basically, Stuxnet targets with laser-like
precision a Siemens industrial control system, invisibly rewriting the code and
altering the variables for the centrifuge engine speeds, which this system regulates.
This very capacity to target a single mechanized unit within a complex industrial
control system at a precise physical location — rather than a specific website —
makes Stuxnet a fearful development in the hacker's armory of tools and software
weapons. The workings of Stuxnet forcefully demonstrate that webbot assemblages can
be used not only to gain access to valuable and protected information but also to
penetrate into and manipulate physical machines and industrial control systems in
acts of netwar.
An Internet Daemon
The kind of multi-functionality now evident in webbot software is dramatically
illustrated in Daniel Suarez's popular cyber-thriller,
Daemon (2008).
[8] Since the novel clearly delineates
some of the central features of the webbot assemblage and its machinic operations, it
is worth examining in some detail. Conspicuously concerned with the blurring of the
human-machinic interface and the becoming autonomous of a highly distributed system,
it suggestively presents a diagram of how human agency — precisely by means of the
webbot assemblage — is disassembled into part-functions and re-distributed into what
amounts to a new, collectively functioning posthuman form. As Suarez later revealed,
the novel's central idea originated in his work developing software systems. After
developing an application for changing the weather in computer games, he made it
available to download on the Internet with an automatic pay system. After several
years, he noticed that it had deposited a tidy little sum into his bank account. He
then began to imagine other things that you could do even if you were dead. The basic
idea for the novel soon followed. Its overarching plot centers on a talented online
game designer, Matthew Sobol, who contrives to set in motion after his death armies
of bots directed by a sophisticated AI game engine. Guided by “the Daemon,” as
this new form of machinic agency comes to be called, the bots carry out increasingly
complicated scenarios. First, they recruit several human agents, including a
journalist who helps to disguise the Daemon's murderous and destructive actions by
shifting the blame onto an investigating police officer whose supposed theft of
Sobol's money is publically “exposed.” Almost invisibly, armies of bots then
remorselessly begin to dismantle our current society and reconstruct it as a fully
distributed, automated system.
An unlikely event triggers the novel's initial action: two of the leading programmers
at Cyberstorm Entertainment, a highly successful producer of Internet games, die of
what first appear to be high-tech accidents. One has his throat slit by a wire that
rises up across the path where he normally rides his motorcycle; the other is
electrocuted when he tries to enter the company’s data center and possibly shut down
the servers. However, the ensuing police investigation reveals that these deaths are
very sophisticated, automated executions. Proceeding slowly and methodically in the
face of the skepticism and technical ignorance of the “higher ups” in the police
department and FBI, the local homicide investigator and a computer consultant who is
initially a suspect piece together evidence of an unprecedented new type of plot in
progress. It turns out that Matthew Sobol, the wealthy and inventive game designer
who had founded and controlled Cyberstorm, had recently died of brain cancer. For
reasons never fully disclosed, Sobol had programmed bots to scour Internet news
sources for the announcement of his own death, and then, in response to this
announcement, to set in motion a vast complex of orchestrated events, including the
destruction of the FBI agents who attempt to search his California mansion. The novel
renders this attempted search-turned-siege as a vivid action sequence. The house is
defended by a bot-controlled, weaponized Hummer programmed to hone in on the heat
signatures of the FBI agents; inside, it is booby-trapped with high tech weapons like
subsonic broadcasts that leave the attacking SWAT team writhing in nausea. Later in
the novel a whole fleet of autonomous vehicles will be built according to online
specifications and will constitute a mechanized army ready for attack.
Much of the novel's action is made possible by Sobol's modification and deployment of
the software he had developed for his hugely popular Massive Multiplayer Online Role
Playing Games, “Over the Rhine” and “The Gate.” To implement his manipulative game scenarios, Sobol had
invented a powerful AI game engine (called “Ego”), which
he has adapted so that it can coordinate the activities of a huge "darknet" of bots
and other robotic agents, and which eventually includes human agents. To enlist the
services of the latter, particularly his devoted gamers, Sobol has also modified the
game map and special graphical user interface developed for the online games. In
another vivid action sequence, a criminal hacker named Brian Gragg, who is also a
highly skilled player of “Over the Rhine,” engages in
combat with German troops led by the fearful Nazi Lieutenant Boerner, a game
character who acquires a quasi-autonomous “life” of his own as a “recruiting
avatar.” After one of their combat encounters, Boerner leaves Gragg an
encrypted clue that will unlock this special interface, after which Gragg is led to
take intelligence and skill tests and then recruited by the now dead Sobol, who
appears to Gragg in a video made before his death.
Gragg is only one of many among the criminals, the disaffiliated, and the out of work
who are similarly induced to join Sobol’s secret network. Membership gives them
access to this special graphical interface from “Over the
Rhine,” expanded to include an integrated Global Positioning System to map
and coordinate both human and bot resources. As the hacker Jon Ross explains to the
FBI investigators, “In essence Sobol is using the GPS system
to convert the earth into one big game map. We're all in his game now”
[
Suarez 2008, 358]. Ross and the FBI then discover that the new interface projects a virtual
overlay onto the agent's environmental space (this requires a wearable computer and
special contact lenses) in which “call-outs” identify human agents to one
another and the resources that are locally available. Beginning with the actions of
bots and progressing to multiple, hybrid forms of agency operating at several levels,
Sobol's online games become an autonomous network whose agents begin to penetrate
into and transform social, economic, and political reality.
In effect, Sobol's online game world functions as a transformational matrix for
bringing about a fully distributed and automated society, initially engineered by
webbots and other robotic agents that collectively constitute a remorseless machine —
the “Daemon” of the title. In computer technology, a “daemon” refers to a
small computer program or routine that runs invisibly in the background, usually
performing house-keeping tasks such as logging various activities and responding to
low-level internal events. Analogously, the reader of the novel doesn't directly
perceive the actions of the webbots, only humans carrying out their instructions —
for example, at a small firm where engineers are converting newly purchased SUVs into
autonomous vehicles according to specifications received online from an outsourcing
company. Over the course of the novel this Internet daemon extends its reach into an
increasing number of production and distribution networks, and thus into the economy
at large, slowly and systematically dismantling and rebuilding the world according to
a ruthless logic of efficiency and highly distributed, low-level intelligence. By the
novel's conclusion, the Daemon has infiltrated and taken over the databases of many
large corporate and financial institutions, and successfully frustrated the
government's efforts to defeat it.
Bots as Narrow AI and Artificial Life
Whereas the idea for Daemon stems from the author's
technical interest in the efficacy of bots, its realization reflects a worry about
the possible consequences of their increasing capacity and our developing dependence
upon them. In interviews Suarez has insisted that his novel is not a sci-fi scenario,
since the necessary technology already exists. Yet, clearly no Luddite, Suarez is
hardly interested in denying the conveniences bots provide, or the labor and tedium
they enable us to avoid. His concern, rather, is with the layering and the extent of
automation that bots are making possible, and as a consequence the tendency to reduce
the number of people making the important decisions that both directly and indirectly
affect human lives. In other words, he is worried by the possibility that bots are
becoming a form of autonomous agency inimical to the public good.
In a web-cast lecture entitled “Bot-Mediated Reality,”
[9] Suarez
focuses on our current society's collective pursuit of hyper-efficiency, arguing that
bots are the perfect tool for its achievement. Cheap to make and operate, bots are
relentlessly efficient, for unlike the humans they replace, they have very few needs.
As evidence of their ascendance, Suarez points to the exponential increase over the
past few years in the number of bots, the amount of malware, the size of hard-drive
space on our computers, and thus the growing size of an ecological niche for software
agents. While bots could certainly become a vector for human despotism, the greater
danger, he thinks, would be the collective human loss of control over society: since
bots could enable society to function as a vast inhuman machine on auto-pilot, its
operations would no longer be susceptible to human steering. Human beings, as
large-brained animals with complex motivations not reducible to efficiency, would
then have created an environment in which they no longer enjoy an adaptive advantage,
in a sudden reversal of human history. Thus Suarez summarily suggests that this
desire for hyper-efficiency has led to and may be locking us into a Darwinian
struggle with low or narrow AI, specifically with the kind of low-level intelligent
software instantiated in bots.
[10]
To be sure, Suarez is not the first or only one to wonder if bots might constitute a
new form of machinic life.
[11] One of the first books to consider bots,
Andrew Leonard's
Bots: The Origin of a New Species
(1998), explicitly raises this possibility.
[12] Leonard, however,
does not pursue what may be the most intriguing corollary to this possibility: that
bots are a new form of digital parasite, like the
sacculina parasite
that slowly converts the sand crab into its own zombie reproductive machine. As a
silicon species whose number has grown over two thousand per cent in the past few
years and now enjoys a rapidly expanding ecological niche, bots could become — or may
be becoming — the agency of a double transformation, providing both a mechanism that
could enable our society to operate on auto-pilot, as a hyper-efficient machine no
longer under human control, and, as a form of “low-life” intelligence, the
medium and environment in which network agency could evolve to greater complexity.
This double transformation, moreover, points to a specifically “machinic” aspect
of the webbot assemblage. In effect, it evolves through the doubling back on itself
or retroaction of a cybernetic loop: humans build and deploy bots in an extension of
human agency, but — from a reversed perspective — the bots also reproduce and evolve
by means of the human desire to build more and better bots. When a certain threshold
is achieved — that of an autonomous technology — this language is no longer
metaphorical, but simply indicates how an assemblage of human and nonhuman agencies
has become self-sustaining and self-perpetuating.
[13]
Daemon is explicitly concerned with the first aspect of
this double transformation, but not with the further evolution of bot technology. It
can thus be read as a cautionary tale, comparable to Michael Crichton's
techno-thrillers like Jurassic Park and Prey, where hubristic humans deploy a new technology that
quickly escapes their control. At the same time, and this is the source of its deeper
interest, Daemon offers a fundamentally different kind
of narrative, one driven by a peculiar transformation and displacement of human
agency: having (posthumously) set the webbot assemblage in motion with the
announcement of his own death, Sobol survives or “lives on” as a form of
artificial or machinic intelligence through the operations that the webbots
collectively perform. As a consequence, Sobol's relationship to his “daemon
spirit” appears as complexly ambiguous. At once a posthumous and
“posthuman” figure, the Daemon is not the cause but the result of the bots'
collective and emergent actions. At the level of Sobol's programmed bots, there is no
“human face” or purpose — only an operational logic extending along vectors
of a vast communicational network, in effect defining a virtual plane of immanence
actualized in a multitude of highly distributed parallel actions. Working
only at this level, this autonomous and remorseless form of agency is
intensely corrosive of large hierarchical organizations like contemporary
corporations and the US government, which require repeated attributions of meaning
and purpose at every level precisely because they operate through (while also
transcending) individual human connections. Having no inherent purpose beyond their
own local functionality, the bots collectively produce an emergent, global effect —
the dismantling of current corporate society — simply by working in concert at the
lowest level of machinic efficiency.
Thus, while “the Daemon” is denominated as such by Sobol and assigned this role
as immanent and material cause by Sebeck and the other characters, this totalizing
effect should be understood as a metaphor, as the novel's symbolic staging of the way
humans “make sense” of a complex transformation, in this instance of how Sobol's
bodily human intelligence has been extended into and replaced by the concerted
actions of thousands of little intelligences at work, as if they were swarms of
robotic homunculi. In other words, the Daemon provides a convenient fiction by which
a unified and transcendent agency can be attributed to the “low-life” actions of
a highly distributed intelligence that is re-making all complex, hierarchical
organizations and structures in its own “flat” image. This diffraction or
gearing down of human agency into lower machinic levels is represented as initially
violent and destructive, in keeping both with the violence of Sobol's first-person
shooter games and the literary genre of techno-thriller fiction. However, it is
ultimately not all bad news for humans, who are quite capable of living productively
in flat, web-like networks instead of large scale, corporate hierarchies. Indeed,
such flat networks may well be the necessary bedrock of a more sustainable human
future, as
Daemon's sequel,
Freedom (2010), suggests.
[14]
Netwar and New Agency
We can now consider from a wider perspective what Suarez has extrapolated from our
contemporary hi-tech world that requires this embedding of the webbot assemblage and
its particular form of agency in his fictional narrative. We shall see first that it
is
not at the level of agent software and the swarms of bots running on
the Internet that the novel's primary fictionalization occurs. Rather, it is more
globally, at their targeting of the structure and mode of operation of corporate
capitalism and its servant (or handmaiden) the nation-state. In
Daemon all the robotic attacks are directed either at corporations that
“reside” in the US or at the US government — indeed, sometimes these two
entities are blurred. In 1886, the US Supreme Court declared that corporations were
“persons” entitled under the Fourteenth Amendment to the same protections as
living citizens. But as Peter Barns in
Capitalism 3.0
points out, following many others before him: “... the modern corporation isn't a real
person. Instead, it's an automaton designed to maximize profit for
stockholders. It externalizes as many costs as it possibly can, not because it
wants to, but because it has to. It never sleeps or slows down. And it never
reaches a level of profitability at which it decides, ‘This is enough. Let's
stop here’”
[
Barns 2006, 23]. Barns' specific terms should make it clear that Sobol's Daemon is meant to
mirror the automaton that is current corporate capitalism; or rather, it is the
latter's inverse or “demon” image, since profit is not its motive. The Daemon's
purpose, rather, is only to perpetuate itself as a fully distributed agency with no
central authority and thus as an inversion of the corporate structure.
[15] It can achieve this, however, only by converting the webbot
assemblage into a war machine. In other words, it can enact and fully become a
completely distributed agency only through all-out netwar against the highly
centralized and hierarchical agencies of the corporate state.
In the 1990s, two researchers for the Rand Corporation, John Arquilla and David
Ronfeldt, defined netwar as “an emerging mode of conflict (and
crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the
protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines,
strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age”
[
Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 6]. Arquilla and Ronfeldt emphasize two particularly relevant aspects of netwar.
First, “Hierarchies have a difficult time
fighting networks,” and thus “It takes networks to fight
networks”
[
Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 15]. Those who practice netwar — the authors mention “criminals, terrorists, or peaceful social activists”
as specific “adversaries” —
therefore operate as completely dispersed nodes or “multi-channel” cells, in
either case as part of de-centralized or highly distributed networks without central
command and control structures; instead, they are “headless” or
“hydra-headed” and allow for local initiative and autonomy. Second, a
frequently deployed tactic for attack in netwar is the use of swarms or a massively
large number of agents that can simply overwhelm the enemy. Whereas the terrorist
organization Al-Quaeda serves as an obvious example of the first feature, the massive
swarms of bots deployed in actual Distributed Denial of Service attacks clearly
exemplifies the second.
Both of these features are fundamental to the netwar carried out by Suarez's
Daemon. It should be noted, however, that the Daemon itself
doesn't fit precisely into any of Arquilla and Ronfeldt's categories of adversary,
but partakes ambiguously of all three. The authors' comments on what they call the
“darkside” and “the ambivalent dynamics of netwar” are revealing in this
respect. They see the type of conflict they call netwar in relation to a specific,
historically repeating pattern: “a subtle, dialectical interplay
between the bright and dark sides in the rise of a new form of
organization”
[
Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 313]. Summarily, whenever new forms of organization emerge, so do “bad guys”
on its cutting edge, who are often eager and very quick “to take advantage of new ways to
maneuver, exploit and dominate”
[
Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 313]. The “good guys,” in contrast, “may be so deeply embedded in and
constrained by a society's established forms of organization that many have
difficulty becoming the early innovators and adopters of a new form”
[
Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 313]. Involving both a new form of organization and new technologies, "the network
form" brings new risks and dangers; specifically, the authors note, threats to
freedom and privacy. Furthermore, as an “ambivalent mode of
conflict” with a dual nature, netwar can be expected to “cascade across the spectrum of
conflict and crime”
[
Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 314] as the information revolution spreads globally and its technology grows more
sophisticated. However, the radical increase in connectivity — which actually blurs
the distinctions between the local, the transnational, and the global — also means
that “insiders” and “outsiders” are no longer so easily separated or even
identified. And far from being a transitional phenomenon, it will likely be a “permanent aspect of the new
era”
[
Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 315].
The problem evident here, however, is that Arquilla and Ronfeldt assume that specific
types of human subject (“good guys” and “bad guys”) already exist and are
simply called forth by the emergence of new forms of organization, that the
“bad” subjects then appropriate these new forms for their own antagonistic
ends. As a consequence, the authors remain bound by a static and essentialist
conception of human agency. I suggest, to the contrary, that the advent of a new form
of organization and a new technology — and it is not evident that either of these
ever occurs separately — alters the very nature of human agency and thus our
understanding of the human subject. Specifically, as new technology both elicits and
creates new possibilities of agency, a corresponding zone of subjective
indetermination is also created. In the new age of digital connectivity — point and
click, cut and paste, rapid information searches and scanning — in which writing and
using code, adapting to completely mobile communications and collectively
participating in online gaming and “social media” are all new forms of action,
the technology transforms what it connects. Specifically, the putatively human
subject is first and foremost (re)defined operationally as a dense node of complex
and adaptive functionalities in multiple networks, and thus a site of uncertain
affects, stoppages, and transductions. These operate as neither simple mechanical
transmissions of force nor as exchanges of meaning, but as both at once, as
entanglements and comminglings in which agency is not only multi-mediated and
multi-modal but viral and memetic. In a technological network society the human is
never fully separated from the nonhuman and the machinic — there are only “degrees
of separation.”
In effect, human agency diffracts into multiple, interacting sub-agencies — many of
which are nonhuman — only to be (but not always) re-assembled in entirely new
configurations and aggregates. In the primary example developed here, a particular
set of human and machinic agencies working together defines the webbot assemblage.
What I called at the outset the “human face” of this assemblage can now be
understood (like Sobol's Daemon) as a passing but
inevitable attempt to maintain the appearance of a human unity and continuity, by
projecting the full dimensionality of human action onto a scene where it has actually
been diffracted into multiple mechanisms and emergent effects. With this in mind we
can return to our point of departure, in order to consider the threat of cybercrime
and to understand why it is not in any simple sense just another type of netwar.
Malware Wars
In the past few years professional Internet security analysts have become
increasingly alarmed by the sophistication and mounting costs of criminal activities
on the Internet. A 2007 issue of the journal
Computer
Economics reported that costs were averaging around 15 billion dollars a
year, but added that these are only reported costs, with many companies and
institutions (especially banks) not releasing information because it could hurt their
reputation for being well protected.
[16] In a recent series of workshops on “the Malware Wars” at the
Santa Fe institute, representatives from the FBI, academic computer scientists, and
security specialists from companies like Google and Symantec quickly arrived at full
agreement on several fact-based issues: first, that the accelerated development of
malware was driven by huge profits, and financed mostly by criminals residing outside
the US, particularly in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China, where there are few if any
laws or regulations; and second, that these criminals are highly organized and
constantly innovating, sharing, or selling new malware to one another and often
working together, especially on large Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
attacks.
[17] Moreover, many of the workshop
attendees were openly pessimistic – not only because “the good guys” are way
behind, always playing defense or catch-up against ingenious new software and tricks,
but because of the very nature of the problem. As one put it: “One software bug or weakness equals millions of compromised
hosts.” Another was equally blunt: “The rate of evolution is so much higher. Malware has such a
high evolvability, it may evolve to the point that the Internet is no longer
useable.” In sum, not only was there full agreement that evolvability and
system robustness are the key issues, but few of the attendees had any problem
accepting the assumption that “[software]
programs behave enough like organisms that some lessons from nature might be
applicable to the Internet and malware.”
The upshot of this perspective is that we are not only witnessing but, to varying
degrees, participating in an escalating evolutionary arms race between attacking and
defending software systems. The hope, explicitly stated at the Santa Fe workshop, is
that the “good guys” will prevail by keeping the operational costs of defending
systems within reasonable limits, and thus at least stabilize the situation until a
more robust and less vulnerable Internet can be evolved. But of course, arms races
are inherently unstable and thus unpredictable.
Two recent developments provide direct evidence. First, as reported in ComputerWorld
Security, a new feature called “Kill Zeus” has been added
to the software toolkit “Spy Eye” currently used by
Russian botnets.
[18] (Zeus is a more widely deployed, rival toolkit also used by Russian
botnets.) While both Spynet and Zeus are designed to set up botnets that specialize
in stealing online banking credentials, the new “Kill
Zeus” feature allows Spy Eye to displace its rival by deleting it from
zombie machines and then assuming the latter's functions. For some time now botnets
have been very sophisticated, deploying modular, multi-functional, and increasingly
adaptive software. Once installed on a machine, this software can download other
components, search for other machines to capture, or be directed to attack specific
targets in massive DDoS attacks. The new “Kill Zeus”
feature (which no doubt has been duplicated in other rival toolkits) brings about a
new level of complexity, by allowing these systems (or certain of their component
modules) to turn each other on and off. In keeping with the analogy with biological
systems, this can be likened to the actions of genetic regulatory networks, in which
genes switch each other on and off, producing complex adaptive systems that evolve or
don't, depending on whether new features (i.e. sub-agencies) enhance the capacities
of the larger systems within which they operate. Whereas software operating on the
Internet has often been compared to neural circuits in the brain performing specific
computational tasks, this new “genetic” component in the webbot assemblage
clearly produces additional variations and thereby increases its evolutionary
potential.
As already noted, these systems are constantly subjected to new evolutionary
pressures. We see further evidence in another development reported in
ars technica.
[19] The article points out that botnets are
increasingly being used for “ideological” and politically motivated attacks,
citing recent DDoS attacks against Australian government websites by anti-Scientology
groups incited by the government's plan to block access to pornography on the
Internet. But it also reveals that new tactics are being deployed in botnets to avoid
detection and thus circumvent defense measures. Heretofore most successful DDoS
attacks owe their success to sheer numbers, often involving fifty or sixty thousand
zombie machines. Of course, the sheer size of these botnets makes their attacks
highly visible. The article notes a new tendency to reduce this visibility — to
attack in many irregularly-timed pulses (“throttling”, rather than employing a
few massive waves), at a much wider bandwidth of IP addresses, and, perhaps more
significantly, to employ camouflage by encrypting the operational scripts in
innocent-looking data. These new tactics, thus far, have proven to be extremely
difficult to defend against. We can therefore expect a new tendency to assemble
smaller, smarter, and less visible botnets, which will in turn demand new and perhaps
different kinds of defense and counterstrike measures. The more recent revelations
about Stuxnet, and in particular its precise targeting capacity and officially
unassignable origins, only aggravate the situation, enabling the murky world of cyber
warfare to transition rapidly into a potentially global and highly destructive
battlefield.
Conclusion
While the escalation of the “malware wars” has been represented as a
technological arms race between “the good guys and the bad guys,” with the
future of the Internet at stake, the actual discourse necessary for understanding the
complex dynamic of interactions at work has been that of biological ecosystems and
the survival and evolution of complex adaptive systems. This conceptual disconnect is
surely evidence that the concepts of netwar, cybercrime, and even cyber warfare
remain too dependent upon conventional and unquestioned notions of human agency, in
which the capacity for intentionality, self-awareness, and control remain uppermost.
But meanwhile, on another scene — should we call it a form of “technological
unconscious”? — new and different forms of agency are at work. Unfortunately,
conventional notions of human agency neither provide a reason for considering the
complex dynamics of the webbot assemblage or even the Internet itself as a
conglomerate assemblage, nor do they instigate any interest in recognizing the
rapidly developing forms of artificial life and intelligence we are busy surrounding
ourselves with and indeed building ourselves into. Unless we analyze the software
assemblages in which these processes are instantiated, we shall fail to perceive and
understand the diffraction of human agency into the mundane, barely intelligent bots
and botnets that operate on and are changing the very nature of the Internet.
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