FBI's Internet warning ineffective

[avdven]

Excerpt taken from Reuters here.

Internet Traffic Flows Smoothly After Warning

The Internet continued to operate smoothly one day after the FBI warned of wide-scale attacks against U.S. Web sites and Internet service providers, network engineers said on Tuesday.

Despite worries that a crippling attack could be launched from Western Europe on Monday and Tuesday, experts who monitor Internet traffic said that they knew of no Web sites that had been knocked offline, and had detected little or no change in the speed of the global computer network.

An analyst for a company that measures network speeds said he had detected a spike in traffic coming out of Turkey and Kyrgyzstan at around 2 a.m. EDT, and a slight slowdown in the U.S. network two hours later.

"We saw a definite degradation of performance, but it was very minimal," said Matrix NetSystems' Abelardo Gonzalez.

Others said they had seen no unusual activity at all.

I had a conversation about something similiar in IRC a few days ago and there were a lot of opinions whether an attack against the Internet would, in fact, cause any effect at all, since traffic can easily be routed other ways. What's your opinion on this? Could the Internet be crippled by a few well placed attacks? If so, what do you think we can do to help stop it?

[cutty]

I am not sure what we can do to stop it but a few well placed attacks on certain routers can cripple the internet in certain areas for a few hours.

Traffic indeed can be easily routed but there are a few paths in certain areas that certain connections go through all the time. If these vulnerably spots can be detected and attacked, there just might be denial of service in some areas.

A full blown effect on the entire internet however, I seriously doubt it. Unless there are many attacks from all over.

To stop it, we might need to be aware of where the attacks will be placed and route that traffic elsewhere.

Just my too sense....

Guidance...