ascribe.org — Researchers have simulated what would happen to Internet reliability in the United States if terrorists were able to knock out various physical components of the network. The good news is that it would be very difficult to cause major disruptions across the country, although destruction of some key parts could seriously degrade Internet quality.
Sep 28, 2006 View in Crawl 4
dalewjSep 28, 2006
Well thats all great, but DNS is the backbone and by far the weekest point of the internet. take out even 1/2 the servers and the internet wouldstart to slow like well the internet.
cyclescottSep 28, 2006
True, but the DNS is harder than people think. The only known attack against it (a couple of years ago) failed to impact the DNS in any major way. It would take a concentrated effort to take down enough scattered root servers. What most sites consider a major DoS attack is a daily traffic load for a DNS root server.
tolzakSep 28, 2006
I don't believe taking out DNS or selected nodes on the Internet is our greatest risk. Rather, it's the potential for a coordinated malware or DoS attack--either indiscriminate or targeted. The number of bot infected systems continues to grow. The sophistication of single malware applications that attempt to exploit multiple vulnerabilities is increasing. It only takes a coordinated Internet-based attack against key financial or public networks/institutions to cripple a national infrastructure sufficiently to cause wide-spread loss of services or significant financial losses.This hasn't happened yet, but the lack of a centrally managed national defense against Internet-based attacks is troubling. While our physical infrastructure might be robust enough to withstand a terrorist attack, there are still a host of issues to resolve in the logical space.
pjbonovoxSep 29, 2006
Not only that, but most of the better content is hosted outside the USA.
bootleSep 29, 2006
This is interesting stuff, too bad I read it all SIX YEARS AGO:<a class="user" href="http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0010251">http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0010251</a>I hope they at least got a cite out of this....
embeemSep 29, 2006
Please, describe in great detail how one might go about performing such an attack -- it's not like anyone might abuse the information.
superkendallSep 29, 2006
You forget though that the backbone of the internet is not just a "tube" that can get clogged up and then you have to call a plumber.Instead the backbone is a hugley complex thing designed to take massive amounts of traffic - even if you did get a massive DOS attack going from a lot of hosts the people that own and maintain the backbone have a lot of tools to dampen a DOS attack pretty quickly.
manic007Sep 29, 2006
Well then maybe this will surprise you!<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet#The_ARPANET_and_nuclear_attacks">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet#The_ARPANET_and_nuclear_attacks</a>
justice7Sep 29, 2006
if you take out the main DNS system, even temporarily ... the internet will still function the same.All DNS servers keep their own local cache's
greatgrizzlySep 29, 2006
Umm hello? The internet was made to survive nuclear attacks. Its going to take A LOT more punishment then anything terrorists are capable of doing.
Closed AccountSep 29, 2006
f**k that, the internet is being attacked by the US and nobody is doing anything about it
Closed AccountSep 30, 2006
Its time people switched to djbdns from BIND and Widows DNS.
sevenofsixSep 30, 2006
I was just about to make this comment. I think this study is a bit redundant and maybe also redundant.