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Could the Internet Be Taken Down In 30 Minutes?
GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware recently interviewed Dino A. Dai Zovi, a former member of Sandia National Labs' IDART (the guys who test the security of national agencies). Although most of the interview is focused on personal computer security, they asked him about L0pht's claim in 1998 if the Internet could still be taken down in 30 minutes given the advances on both the security and threat sides. He said that the risk was still true."
By a nuclear war for example.
Just visit url://internet
In 2002 4 or 5 of the 13 root servers were big news ... although we've come a long way since then, I think the integrity of the internet still depends on these things.
Every so often we get reports that the internet is a rickety old jalopy on it's last leg.
Given this impression and add to it the fact that the botnets seem to grow in tandem with the internet, I wouldn't be surprised to see an attack take her down in 30 minutes although I'm no expert. I think 30 minutes is a generous amount of time if one of the larger botnets turned its attention on the root servers for a DDOS attack. You'd have some fail overs and some courageous engineer might save the day but I'd put my money on the bad guys.
I would be surprised if it was down for more than 24 hours following that though.
My work here is dung.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/040209-obama-cybersecurity-bill.html
A federally enabled Internet kill switch will place an Internet Off Button in the White House which can be used to instantly deactivate the Internet in case of an emergency, such as the plebes getting riled up. This bill, introduced to the Senate on April Fools, is expected to pass.
In 30 minutes?
You're doing it wrong.
Not true! ARPANET was designed as it was because there were only a few super computing sites at the time, and they were separated by quite a bit. The redundancy comes in to play only because they didn't want to lose important access if a router broke somewhere, as they are wont to do. All it was designed for was to survive a single point of failure. But even that is distorted. Just because ARPANET was designed that way decades ago, doesn't mean that large corporations decided to keep with that philosophy when they took over!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Guy who works in security testing wants people to believe that the state of internet security is OMGcritical? Shouldn't this be tagged "jobsecurity" rather than "security"?
Assuming a vulnerability is exploited in BGP, the internet would go bibi in a hurry. That's all our eggs in one basket, and it's a fairly rickety basket. There's still a lot of trust inherent in the BGP fabric and trust is a 4 letter word to anyone who deals with infrastructure security.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Actually, this is exactly what it's supposed to survive.
Well, I'm reasonably certain my computer can't withstand a nuclear attack, and I don't think most porn stars are radiation-resistant, so it's really trivial to me whether or not there is still an internet after a nuclear war.
According to my parents and people in my office, the Internet is occasionally down for several hours at a time. Fortunately, they have the ability to reboot it when necessary.
All it would take is the right cables to be cut for the internet to go down. Perhaps with a rented backhoe even.
A single backhoe might have some trouble getting the entire internet in 30 minutes. What's the top speed on those things?
When Pakistan decided to block youtube they inadvertently caused a global routing blackhole. The internet is built with the BGP routing protocol, which is based on trust. You trust that your peers will advertise correct routes. If they don't then you get misinformation like in the Pakistan/Youtube situation and it spreads, pretty soon everyone thinks going through Pakistan is the best way to reach youtube so all traffic (or almost all) goes there, then Pakistan simply drops those packets.
... at least for a little while.
Of course this was an accident, but a malicious attack could simply advertise lots of incorrect routes and hose up everything
OK, then what about by a Cylon invasion? (Which of course, would begin with a nuclear strike.) I doubt that our toaster children would have any trouble with Mccafree or Norton products.
In my experience if we did have a Cylon invasion McAfee and Norton may be our ONLY defense. Upload it and watch as they can no longer function
http://www.businessinsider.com/could-the-sun-destroy-the-earth-2009-3
Coronal Mass Ejection, a big enough one could wipe out all life on earth, and fry all the electronics.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
"A memorandum published by the DoD in March 1982 declared
that the adoption of TCP/IP as the DoD standard host-to-host
protocol was mandatory and would provide for "host-to-host
connectivity across network or subnetwork boundaries."
Military requirements for interoperability, security,
reliability and [b]survability[/b] are sufficiently pressing to
have justified the development and adoption of TCP and IP in
the absence of satisfactory nongovernment protocol
standards."
Emphasis mine.
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/tcpdigest_paper.txt
The stars may not survive, but their videos could in a datastore underground. And your computer could survive in a bomb shelter. Underground. You know, where you live. In your mama's basement.
Heh heh
wake up and hold your nose
I have all my most important sites IP addresses written on Post It notes all over my wall.
Bring it!
If you want a ride bouncier than the storm chasers in KC10s you can do about 22-25 mph in a Ford 555 (80's vintage backhoe). And that's on a decently paved street. You hit a decent pothole and you better have your feet on the posi button because when your steering wheels hit ground again, you're likely to zoom into traffic or onto the sidewalk.
It's why I only ever did over-street travel in ours at night. Then again, backhoe's are naturally overbalanced to the rear, I never did try to get our straight farm tractor up to speed on surface streets.
I've popped a wheelie in exactly two tractors in my day, one a backhoe, another a dozer. Sort of frightening when you do it for the first time and aren't expecting it.
Take BGP for example. Very little security in it.
Sounds like somebody not involved in actual BGP work and/or just scaremongering (worship me because I say scary things).
Nobody configures their peers using dns addresses. Doesn't everyone use md5 hashes? Doesn't everyone filter their customers routes?
I did "most of" the customer side BGP at an ISP for "years" with quite a few customers... if every time someone redistributed 0/0 or 10/8 to us we took down the internet, frankly, it would have been down most of the time. Not to mention people whom thought their old providers IP space was their own (as opposed to actual ARIN space)
Then there's the guys who prepend like a hundred times, always good for a laugh or two.
Folks whom think they can take down global BGP by flapping their routes a couple times and don't even know what route dampening is... well...
Now, yeah, one bad dude could take over one router and maybe temporarily down one ISP that is run by fools who don't follow the "rules", but one badly run ISP out of bazillions is not "the internet".
Overall, I'd say out of 30K AS, of which at least 50% don't really know what they're doing, yet they still can't take the sucker down, god knows I've seen everything tried at least once, so a couple black hats don't even have a chance.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
. . . she accuses me of "turning off" or "breaking the Internet" at least once a day.
That's the power that you get with 57 levels of Slashdot Achievements. A big switch labeled "Internet On/Off."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
OK, then what about by a Cylon invasion? (Which of course, would begin with a nuclear strike.) I doubt that our toaster children would have any trouble with Mccafree or Norton products.
In my experience if we did have a Cylon invasion McAfee and Norton may be our ONLY defense. Upload it and watch as they can no longer function
You're horrible. Not even the Cylons deserve Norton and McAfee.
I think your're confusing your childhood with a "yo momma" joke.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
I'm saving my copy of windows ME just for the cylon revolt.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.