Anti-Defense

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Description

Umair Haque:

"You can't defend a centralized structure against a network attack in the traditional sense (just ask Twitter). But you can anti-defend against a network attack, by decentralizing your own resources to the edges — something that, in physical warfare, is a big no-no. When resources are spread and replicated across as broad, diverse network of your own as possible, if one node goes down, the others stay up." (http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/08/why_network_strategy_is_differ.html)

Example

""Every TorrentFreak reader can easily store a backup of The Pirate Bay on his or her hard drive. Everyone can download it straight from The Pirate Bay, conveniently packed into a massive torrent amounting to 21.3 Gigabytes of data.

The anonymous uploader who compiled this huge torrent told TorrentFreak that he wanted to have a backup of the site in case all torrents mysteriously disappear after the site is sold. "I suppose I want us to have assurances. If the TPB deal disappoints us, we can just put it up again," he said."

That's a textbook example of an anti-defense. TPB couldn't defend itself through traditional means: it was found guilty of copyright infringement. So what happened next? An anonymous network member launched a perfect anti-defense, replicating TPB's torrent info from the hub directly to the edges.

Now, record labels aren't fighting one TPB — they're fighting many. And they don't have the resources or competencies to win that war — they're already almost bankrupt." (http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/08/why_network_strategy_is_differ.html)