If you want to bring down a country's information infrastructure and you don't want anyone to know who did it, the weapon of choice is a distributed denial of service attack. Using rented botnets, you can launch hundreds of thousands — even millions — of infobombs at a target, all while maintaining total deniability. In this hypothetical scenario, a single attack launched by China against the US lasts only a few hours, but a full-scale assault lasting days or weeks could bring an entire modern information economy to its knees.

At Wired.

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