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I suggest that the question posed was not that the Internet would be brought down, but that the Internet would be unusable for the United States to varying degrees.
(quote)
I’m informed that you think that within 30 minutes the seven of you could make the Internet unusable for the entire nation. Is that correct?” (/quote)
Remember, the Internet encompasses the whole planet, and I don’t believe they could bring it all down in 30 min. There are several areas that would be considered the weaker links in the Internet, such as the Telcos themselves. These buildings house local area connections for voice and data, and these signals are passed on to another CO. they eventually reach various communication backbones. From these backbones, they go to smaller and smaller CO’s until they reach the local neighborhood box where the card for your phone connection to your house is. IF something were to happen to a large number of CO’s at one time, what this could be I don’t know, there would be a significant loss of connectivity.
Just some food for thought, I am sure someone could come up with a scenario that would actually look feasible.
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IMHO, it could be done, through a worm/DDoS like attack. If you look out how severe the code red worm or nimda hit the internet (i still see hundreds of these a day) and then think about what would happen if someone was a little more malicious, you could have a serious problem on your hands. For example, what if some type of sadmind/code red/slapper/nimda (translation, multi-platform, multi-vulnerability) like worm were to propogate relatively slowly (at least not as obviously bandwidth consuming as nimda/code red) and then have some kind of a preconfigured payload day of a certain time GMT, where the infected machines begin to probe every IP on the internet (starting at different locations, kind of reminds me of the lawnmower man where all the phones in the world rang at once) as fast as possible (increasing propogation and consumption of bandwidth)...The bandwidth usage would be outrageous.
It may even be more lethal if you were to couple in some precanned attacks on other popular needed services, like email or DNS. Won't take much of the infrastructure down, but it would sure make it slow so as to be unusable.
Neb
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I agree that the average computer user simply would not have the power to do so. But in this, the information cyberwarfare era, it would be very easy, again very easy, for a country such as china or korea, iraq, iran, etc to pull this off. The initial planning for the attack would take several months because they would have to make a list of virtually every single router in the united states. Once that is complete they would have to set up the list of routers, devide the list into major pipes, middle pipes, and small pipes. Once thats done they would take each list, and upload it in notepad form to each one of the servers on their WAN. There is a type of attack where you spoof your IP to that of the victim. Then you send out a SYN packet to a particualr router, and that router sends a SYN-ACK to the target. When the target recieves it, the router will not get a responce, so the default is to send the packet 3 more times (4 in all). Now if you send this one packet, through a list of routers, say 1000 routers, that target will recieve 4000 packets.
Now, If you make that target IP the IP of the router, you will have the routers attacking other routers and tying them up. Now figure how many routers there are in the world, and how many pipeline routers there are in the US. The initial attack will put the worlds routers all against the major pipelines in the US. This will tie them up. . Now once the major pipes are tied up, the US's traffic, and the incoming traffic from the world will be diverted to the middle pipes. This will put a strain on them already. Once they are tied up you send the second wave of the attack. This will target the already straining middle pipes, tying them up furthur, which will divert all the traffic to the small pipes. These small pipes are not designed to handle all this traffic, and will cause a domino effect of samller routers going down, until all of them are down.
Internet is now unaccesible, but not destroyed. You would then untie the middle routers and all the traffic would flood them, without the help of the small routers, the same would happen to them. Finally you unlease the entire internet's traffic onto the main pipes. Which will tie them up and it would virtually be impossible to get anything through.
So there you have it.
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Lets not forget that the internet uses a mesh topology and router are capable of selecting the best route for data. I think the best you could do is take out a few back bones and split the internet into several large chunks.
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Yes xmadness: Iraq, Korea, etc over several months. L0pht over several minutes? This is a snow job pure and simple.
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It was said that if apocolyps came, the internet would be the only thing to survive.
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If you would like to see the DNS Root Name Server Query Response Time Graphs, they can be seen at the following site.
http://www.cymru.com/DNS/dns.html
Information, about the whereabouts of these servers can be found on this page or by following the links on it.
I was amazed at how much information is readily available on these servers considering how important they are to the internet.
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I think maybe with a few thousand l337 h4x0rs acting as one it could be done in under 30 minutes, otherwise it would take days and weeks of planning/preperation, then an hour or so to make it happen, if you cut off access to a few hundred key servers it would create mass panic and the internet would revert to an ancient form, however as the internet was designed to last through nuclear war, it will most likely never fail, no matter how hard poeople try. Besides, why would anyone addicted enough to computers and the internet want to destroy the very entities which they thrive on?
