DeadNet

Isn't the Internet supposed to die today?

http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd...-24&do_alert=0

supposed... but its still up..some one messed up something.

<damn since internet is up i suppose to be working now>

Yeah, we've been discussing that over HERE

ok, just wanted to ask something.

how is it that you can bring the internet down? considering its a bunch of servers connect together, but that would only happen if EVERY server was affected.

also, this threat may go ahead, however, you may only access servers that were never touched, and never see any effects.

just a thought.

The internet (well... parts of it) can be "taken down" by taking down the backbone(s) and backbone routers...

If you have no way to get to the servers that were "never touched" what good are the servers?

Consider this story...

http://lw.pennnet.com/News/Display_N...&NewsID=106166

A boat supposedly severed their fiber connection cutting off their internet connection.
While the internet didn't go down for everyone... it sure did for them...
This is more of a physical "attack"... but I don't think it was intentional...

but that is what i was saying, you would only notice the effects if you accessed sites on servers attacked. otherwise it could come and go without even noticing.

also, what are the backbone servers..... as far as i understood it was independant servers networked together... ? im only here to learn.

Any attack on the internet itself would most likely attack either DNS or routers.

DNS is the protocol and servers which translate names to IP addresses. It has been attacked before. There are a number of "root servers" around the world, which are the core of the entire DNS system. If you can take down a large proportion of them, the internet would effectively become unusable.

Routers are usually custom hardware devices made by (e.g.) Cisco. These are vulnerable because they need to securely communicate with each other details of every route which exists to every network which forms the internet (in principle at least). If this communication fails or is subverted, then packets will end up going to the wrong place, around in circle etc, and the entire system will fail.

Both of these things have been successfully attacked before (either deliberately or accidentally), and resulted in several hours when the internet was mostly not usable for most people.

However, they get gradually stronger.

A single software bug affecting them all would be unlikely. The top-level DNS mostly run different versions of different software on different OSs on different hardware.

Any attack would likely be most serious if a flaw was found in a protocol used by these core servers, to speak to each other, which allowed someone to attack them all at once or confuse them all. I *think* this happened with the protocol which routers use to communicate routes once (Not sure what that protocol was).

Most of the routers on the internet are doing very simple routing, and have only a few, mostly static routes, or trust a relatively small number of other routers. But the "backbone" ones which are owned by major ISPs need to communicate with each other a great deal. This is considered by some as a weakness.

One of the things which IPv6 fixes, is apparently, it makes routing much easier.

Slarty

thanks slarty, that explains it to me quite clearly :)

Slarty --

Both attacks have been successfully performed before? Do you have any resources you could throw at me on those events? I'd like to read up on that.