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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?
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
I have all my most important sites IP addresses written on Post It notes all over my wall.
Bring 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.
If Family Guy has taught me anything, it's that everyone should go to the nearest Twinkie factory in the event of a nuclear holocaust.
If Family Guy has taught you anything, then may god have mercy on us all.
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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.