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Cyber Commander Says It's 'Not Realistic' To Shut Down Internet (washingtonexaminer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-to-deal-with-amusing-people-101 dept.

An anonymous reader links to a report on Washington Examiner: It simply would not be possible to shut down areas of the Internet that terrorists use to conduct malicious activity, the head of U.S. Cyber Command told a Senate panel on Tuesday. "In a very simplistic way, people ask why can't we shut down that part of the Internet. ... Why are we not able to infiltrate that more?" Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asked Cyber Command leader Adm. Mike Rogers during a hearing on the agency's budget for fiscal 2017. Manchin maintained it was a common question from his constituents. "I've had people ask me, can't you just stop it from that area of the world where all the problems are coming, be it Syria or in parts of Iraq or Iran," he said. "I'm not just trying to find an answer, because that question is asked like shut her down, like you do your telephone, but it doesn't work that way," Manchin concluded.

17 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Resilient by design by FrankHaynes · · Score: 4, Informative

    Knuckleheads. ARPAnet and MilNet were designed to be resilient against centralized attack and outages.

    "THE INTERNET IS DOWN!! THE INTERNET IS DOWN!!"

    --
    slashdot: A failed experiment.
    1. Re:Resilient by design by guruevi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      No we don't. The Internet considers censoring as damage and routes around it. Each country has telephone lines and satellite communications. If you shut down the "Internet" from routing through it's common carriers (fiber etc) someone can hang a few thousand 56k modems on their phone systems and call in to their neighbors or even through the censoring country and connect all their traffic that way. Same goes for satellite, just bounce it around a few times and it can come from anywhere.

      That's how Syrians and Iranians were still able to connect after their countries shut down their internets.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    2. Re:Resilient by design by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 5, Informative

      ARPAnet and MilNet were designed to be resilient against centralized attack and outages

      During the evolution from those networks to the current, commercialized, information utility, much of that design was abandoned. We have migrated from an everything-is-redundantly-multiconnected, route around failures, survive a nuclear exchange system to a hierarchy, with a distinction between core and edge, where loss of certain boxes can shut down 10,000 to 100,000 end user sites.

      (That's why those boxes are designed with internal reduncancy, like a telephone exchange. And I know them intimately, having spent over a decade designing parts of them.)

      The core/backbone does retain some of the features of the Internet's cold-war-survival origin (though the transition to fiber and physical ring layouts made that more vulnerable to multipoint failures, as well.) So some of it still has part of the old robustness.

      Then there are new services which added new dependencies (and sometimes new surprises when something goes down or goes away and a lot of stuff breaks).

      And to top it off, the discussion is not about government actors managing to taking the net down, but identifying and surgically cutting off a designated portion of it.

      So arguing from the characteristics of the robust-against-nukes network design we once had - and haven't had for decades - isn't particularly germaine.

      --
      Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
    3. Re:Resilient by design by lgw · · Score: 2

      You can still "turn off the internet" for a country you don't like, but it will require bombs to be thorough. Or for an island nation, there will be few enough cables to cut.

      Obviously, TFA was distinguishing between a routing-only solution and military action, but I'm, not sure how legitimate that is. At some point (as dependence on the internet increases) taking a nation off the internet becomes just as much an act of war as sending your navy to blockade trade, at which point you might as well include some military action in your planning. Any country with natural or politically-imposed physical-layer bottlenecks between it and its neighbors is vulnerable.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  2. Crappy headline - forgot "areas of" by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >> It's 'Not Realistic' To Shut Down Internet
    >> not be possible to shut down areas of the Internet that terrorists use

    Big difference. Unfortunately, I see these kind of inquiries leading to a "why don't we have a great big 'murican firewall" train of thought in a year or two.

    1. Re:Crappy headline - forgot "areas of" by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Funny

      We can have Nigeria pay for it.

  3. Sure you can... by Etherwalk · · Score: 2

    It's not easy, but it's certainly possible to mostly do that. It's just that it hurts more than it helps in most cases, because it hurts the legit stuff going on. You want to change this, you have to actually incentivize the leaders in those countries to crack down in an effective way.

  4. What are you, my dad? by wardrich86 · · Score: 2

    I mean, who else makes threats to "shut down the internet"?

  5. Re:YEs, it does work that way by mrbester · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you cut the link cables to Europe are you cutting off Europe from you or are you really cutting yourself off from Europe?

    --
    "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
  6. BGP by Etherwalk · · Score: 2

    Not really. The internet was designed to route around damage, not deliberate breakage. It's taken decades to get more secure, and it's still not really there. Any serious network routing guys here want to speculate about how easy deliberate breakage would be? What if you cut all the big pipes and used all the satellite connections to send bad routing updates all the time, for example? I haven't looked at this stuff in years, but vaguely remember stories of small BGP misconfigurations taking most of a country offline.

    1. Re:BGP by EmperorArthur · · Score: 2

      Sure, you can broadcast bad routes. It's happened (on accident) in the past before. Typically backbone providers just filter the network sending those bad routes, and have everything fixed within a day. Worst case scenario is the US ends up being separated from the rest of the internet because nobody trusts us. A much more likely scenario is US free interconnects go away, and we end up having to pay for traffic to take whatever path the other networks deem best when going to the US.

      If the US injects bad routing packets through other means, for example by injecting them into foreign satellite providers, then that's straight hacking. Sure the US does hack foreign systems, but this is slap in the face type stuff and would result in political retaliation.

      tldr: Sending bad routing updates is not an option. It would backfire spectacularly.

      --
      So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
  7. Just shut down... by RJFerret · · Score: 2

    ...the atmosphere, that's where the bad weather is.
    ...the oceans, that's where the garbage patches are.
    ...bacteria, that's where infections derive.
    ...brains, that's where ignorance thrives.

  8. Re:Cyber Command? by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    His title is Commander, US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), which is a unified sub-command of the US Military. Calling him "Cyber Commander" is a stupid journalistic oversimplification, it's not his actual title.

    Of course, you can always tell government drones when they refer to "cyber" anything, but that is just the way it goes.

  9. Geo-blocking doesnt require gr8 firewall-o-murca!! by tommyatomic · · Score: 2

    Route-poison traffic to and from location X. People forget that valid Internet communication is 2way. Sure they might be able to broadcast out but not being able to receive in effectively cuts them off. Their internet will get awfully quiet.

    The thing is that "head of U.S. Cyber Command" is not saying is that cutting off the internet also cuts off easy common communication for any intelligence resources the US has in that area.

    In this instance a communications blackout works against both parties.

  10. Re:YEs, it does work that way by Whorhay · · Score: 2

    While countries can be largely knocked off the internet by severing their physical connections, that isn't really the question at issue. The panel was asking about eliminating the ability for terrorists to organize and recruit over the internet, especially through the dark web. The reason this goal isn't the same as cutting off a country's access is that extremists aren't neatly limited to national boundaries and they certainly don't mind those borders when establishing websites for recruitment. It's the same basic problem that terrorists always pose, they are generally indistinguishable from the general public until such time as is too late.

  11. Re:YEs, it does work that way by wyHunter · · Score: 5, Funny

    If the channel tunnel is closed, it means the Continent is isolated.

  12. Re:Cyber Command? by turbidostato · · Score: 2

    "Calling him "Cyber Commander" is a stupid journalistic oversimplification"

    As if calling him "Commander, USCYBERCOM" didn't sound stupid enough (isn't it something coming from Mattel?).

    Those big boys and their expensive toys...