Preparing for cyber warfare: US Air Force floats botnet plan

I found this article about Air Force Cyber Command's (AFCYBER) new BOTNET program. The "botnet" will shift the AFCYBER's role from strictly defense to defense with an offensive capability. From what I have read the BOTNET will use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) strategy to crash the computer networks of our enemies. "How are they going to do this..." you ask? Maybe with your computer...

arstechnica.com...

I know that the best defense is a good offense, but this could be damn scary. I'm pretty sure other countries already have this capability, and hackers have been doing this sort of thing for years. So is this just the DOD playing catch-up?

I want to know what kind of oversight a powerful program like this will have in place.

What kind of rule of engagement will be implemented?

Will I be able to surf for porn while AFCYBER is crashing China's electronic financial infrastructure?

Does anyone have any thoughts or other information on this?

It makes sense and would only involve DoD machine banks or affiliations. Typically, bots are waiting on the client machines to be issued a command. The Server machine issues the command to the clients. The clients then conduct DoS attacks.

Usually, each bot machine will use large packets that will hit or flood ports of the enemy network using the UDP protocol.

Defending against massive DoS attacks has always been difficult but there are some easy ways to harden against them. For example, clustered, load-balanced networks are much more difficult to bring down.

I'm assuming Chinese networks are all clustered and load-balanced for redundency. In effect, if you can hit all machine on the subnet, you can saturate the bandwidth preventing important requests from arriving at their destinations (the enemy network).

If I were the DoD (and I used to work for them), i'd be researching other means of offensive measures. China has the "Great Firewall of China". So that pretty-much leaves any port 80, FTP or SMTP ports. The DoD should have some backdoors into these networks, so they can be taken down from the inside.