The increasing militarisation of cyber-space comes in response to fears of critical damage caused by digital weapons like Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS). Understanding that the botnets are the key platform behind DDoS, we compared the costs of running a large-scale attack with the approximate downtime loss in a country-scale attack in case of Serbia, showing that DDoS are readily available weapons of possible mass disruption. Taken as a whole, this paper suggests responding to risks by combating cybercrime as the DDoS enabler, rather than by militarisation.
