Black Wall

Bot net nodes infest everything. Home routers, IP surveillance cameras, networked printers, IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and so on and so forth.

These zombie nodes persist after the botnet itself has been shut down. All of the nodes use some kind of distributed control and communication network that also persists after shutdown. The nodes themselves are continually running some kind of deep/machine learning process to achieve some kind goal.

Assume that the latency and limited capacity per-node impose a significant lag between new data received, models are updated, and new actions taken. It would be something like COVID and the lag between event, reported infections, and serious medical issues; in fact, the differences between dead, long hauler, future issues, and got off scott free could be a really good metric.

Human reaction time is about 750ms and it could be days or weeks for these zombie nodes.

The bot nets would be designed to be survivable and very, very difficult to destroy. There’s an article about using stenography on twitter bio pics as a form of authentication. Furthermore, there would be significant effort expended to defeat network analysis.

It would also be reasonable to assume that there are more than one botnet for any given group. One manages it, one collects data, one processes it, and one acts on it; and they all overlap. The botnets are built using exploits of current devices which are unlikely to ever get patched and they slowly die as infected nodes are replaced; assuming there isn’t another botnet looking to grow by exploiting new nodes…

So the idea of the black wall is to separate the Internet into green and red (aka the wild net) zones.

The underlying kit cannot be cleaned of the malicious code and such because it would require removing and replacing everything in one globally coordinated go and that isn’t going to happen for any number of reasons.

So you need to build a green zone on top of the existing Internet.

If you need to maintain connectivity with the red net then you need something like NIPRNET, if you want a wholly separate thing then you need SIPRNET.

It could down to something as simple as a “bring your own device” system. The general equivalent of playing online with an XBOX instead of a PC.

The black wall could be just a bunch of AIs that filter shit between the green and red nets; not unlike using a Baracuda to eat spam email and filter out known bad websites, javascripts, and so on and so forth.

The black web (aka the dark web)

Poking holes in the black wall is figuring out how to sneak things past the filters.

Netwatch is a group that builds the filter rules, AI models, and/or what ever the fuck. They definitely have a DEFCON type group to keep up on the latest fuckery. At the end of the day, it’s an arms race and it comes down to the zero day exploit; whatever that means in this context.

Air gaping is a thing, and you have to be able to defeat it…

Social engineering is a thing. Hijacking could come down to getting a guy laid (see Goodfellas). Fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA, etc.

At least a couple of Cyberpunk 2077 side missions involved getting inside and either taking information or destroying it… aka breaching the air gap.

You could just get leverage over someone and then have them stick a dongle in a network port… Just stick this into that and your debt is gone…

Getting the real org chart for a mega corp could have real advantage, aka network analysis. You’d know who to extract, who to leverage, and who to hit.

People are overworked, under appreciated, and in general just don’t want to get fired. Communication issues abound. ie a marketing team has a bot net to push something, IT provisions it, and the email to shut it down never gets sent, and then… Hackers get what they want, cut bait, and the botnet lives on because they couldn’t kill it if they wanted to; fuck it, we ain’t paying for it anyways…

Feral bot nets and/or bots.