Paranoia *MI*GHT* destroy ya.. or, it might get you looking in the right direction for a change.

[arthurthedented]

Today .. Facebook had a serious interruption for a a couple of hours. the news feeds.. werent.
Today .. Youtube had some kind of a problem.. the playlists and favorites were down.
Today yahoo IM had some kind of a problem.. an hour or two (that I tested) that I couldnt log on.

Yesterday... Google quit china.... because theyre sophisticated well funded

Comments

[tsarren]

A little perspective might be in order here.

The World Wide Web is a bunch of documents that reside on servers hooked up to the internet. The internet itself is a network made up of hardware, comprising clients, servers, hosts, and various infrastructure. Of the latter, some of the most important are the 13 DNS root nameservers.

The nameservers translate host names (www.foo.com) into IP addresses, which are how machines on the internet find each other (simplified, but more-or-less gets the point across). They are not single machines - the four that are actually in a single physical location operate on collections of redundant hardware. The other nine are virtual - distributed across multiple geographic locations.

Any attempt - and they have been made - to bring down the entire internet would have to permanently disable all 13 root nameservers.

Hacking yahoo IM or Facebook just doesn't even register on that scale. If a bunch of banks or other financial institutions had all had trouble on the same day, then I might be wondering. Now, maybe someone out there is cutting their teeth on social networking sites. The Chinese attack on Google does merit some thought.

But the entire internet is not going to disappear overnight. Some folks might lose some financial information. But we are not looking at TEOTWAWKI here. The entire redundancy of the internet as a whole would have to be overcome in a permanent fashion for that to happen. Stuff will still get shipped and there will still be food in the grocery stores the same way those things happened 30 years ago: by phone. In a long-term outage, we can revive Fidonet, a store-and-forward network of BBS's that ran over the phone lines before the internet was established. It's crude and slow by today's standards, but get us some connectivity.

Wikipedia has some decent articles on the root nameservers and how the internet functions.

clear on all that. but...

[arthurthedented]

the substance of my little rant there is that the net is .. as much infrastructure in a military sense as dams or bridges, railway marshelling yards or tunnels, fuel or arms depots.

If there were a bunch of chinese soldiers standing around with cameras , taking measurements, checking blueprints and noticeably doing tests and making plans for attacks on any of those OTHER things... it would be treated as a completely different order of threat.. but its not.

As to the famous resilience of the internet.. what you say is true. It seems that well funded sophisticated organizations may be working on that problem even as we speak.. so complacency that a system designed to survive nuclear war is also suitably protected from nuclear war scale hack attacks and sophisticated stratagies and software tools... is something I dont think we can afford to gamble on.

as to 'just going back to doing things the old way'.. in the long run, for the survivors, that might be true. but to think that could meaningfully happen in a scale of weeks or months is not. And if you factor in the chaos caused by say.. one month of the North american internet infrastructure being so badly comprimised as to count as being 'down'.. getting running on 'paper and phone calls like the old days' would take much much longer.

and when I speak of 'the survivors' I'm being neither facetious nor alarmist. if the food distribution net stops working.. if the stuff piles up in warehouses while folks starve... if the parts of our infrastructure that our monitored or run via internet applications stop... I will wager that will include gas, electricity , fuel distribution.. and essentially all commerce a one month outage will kill a substantial chunk of the populations and drive us back as badly as if fleets of conventional bombers had swarmed over both costs and bombed all major cities.

or do you think when the ATMs and cards stop workign the grocery stores and gas stations are just going to GIVE away what they have in stock? and even if they do, if its not replenished say.. more than once (stuff that was already enroute) how will that effect things?

maybe the Chinese Internet Army (ooh nice acronym.. too bad its taken) cant do a month, or even a day yet. ... maybe theyre working on it..

and remember they dont have to 'take it down' they just have to make it ineffective... if they cripple critical systems with a bogus stream of authentic *looking* information (let alone a nation sized DOS attach or some kind of 'all widows machines will die on command' virus) it functions just as well for offensive purposes as if the network was down.

and maybe we should take defense of our internet infrastructure more seriously- in an organized well funded and smart way than we are currently taking our (expensive but laughable) efforts to secure our airports and ports... (please oh pleas NOT with the same idiots in charge!)

Just saying.