The Dark Forest Web

Web services in Japan have been hacked one after another lately, and there are suggestions that AI agents are behind the attacks.

Following the news, I started to picture a web where a service gets hacked the moment it goes public. It reminded me of the dark forest in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy.

Automated attacks are nothing new. Shodan, Masscan, and Mirai all show that anything reachable on the internet has long been scanned and attacked, and Mirai already automated everything from scanning to infection back in 2016. What AI changes is how cheaply an attacker can adapt to each target, probing its specific weaknesses and adjusting tactics based on what it finds. That widens the range of targets and techniques. What worries me is a web where a public service gets attacked continuously, with tactics tailored to it, even if no human attacker ever chose it as a target.

In the second book, The Dark Forest, the universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter moving quietly through the trees, and any civilization that reveals its location is wiped out by another. A web where an attack follows discovery, with no one deciding to make it, follows the same rule. Publishing a service is revealing your location.

The same situation can also be compared to the sophons. In the novel, the Trisolarans send sophons to Earth, and through them they can see and hear everything humans do. Only what stays inside human minds is hidden, and humanity is placed under near-total surveillance. If agents are probing everything that is reachable, the web is in a similar state: nothing publicly exposed can count on going unnoticed.

Spoilers for the trilogy follow.

In the novel, the standoff is held in place for a while by mutual assured destruction. Luo Ji threatens to broadcast the location of the Trisolaran star system to the universe, which would doom both civilizations. In the third book, that deterrence breaks down. But on the web, there may be no equivalent deterrent.

Later, the Trisolarans communicate through a humanoid android called Sophon, controlled by the sophons. She serves as an instrument of surveillance and domination, yet eventually helps individual humans. The same intelligence can be a threat or an ally, depending on whose goals it serves.

Unlike civilizations in the dark forest, web services cannot survive by staying silent. They exist to be discovered. If AI agents make attacks cheap and relentless, the defenders may have to become just as autonomous.