RE: Counter DoS

["Mark Borchers" <mborchers () igillc com>]

> The company said it bases its theory on the military doctrine of 
> "necessity and proportionality", which means the response to 
> an attack is 
> proportionate to the attack's ferocity. According to the 
> company, a response could range from "profiling and 
> blacklisting upstream providers" or it 
> could be escalated to launch a "distributed denial of service 
> counter-strike" ... 

Their ROE white paper is full of pseudo-military phraseology
that suggests lots of safeguards in place to respond only to 
verifiably culpable adversaries and to ensure responsible
executive oversight.....right up to the point when they
start talking about distributed denial of service counterattacks
(under the heading which they refer to as "assymmetric measures").

I wonder, are they planning to launch these DDoS attacks from
compromised hosts belonging to unwitting accomplices like the
bad guys do?  Or by enlisting the computing resources of all
Symbiot customers (i.e., if customer A gets attacked, hosts
at customers B, C, and D are employed in the retailiation)?
I'm assuming they use the term "distributed" advisedly.

Either way, it sounds illegal by design.