Is there a way to destroy / damage the internet?

[SpaceMarine93]

With the internet growing ever larger and the world more interconnected by it, inevitably there will be malicious elements of society who would want to wreck havoc with it, or on it, for their own gains (Crackers, terrorists, dictatorships, fraud criminals etc.). DOS attacks, viruses, Trojans, zombie bots, internet fraud, disconnection etc. are now more prevalent than ever.

Taking it to the extreme, it will only be a matter of time before someone might consider severely damaging, if not destroy, the entire internet as a means to an end, or to an end itself.

For example, earlier this year an old lady in the Eastern Europe accidentally cut off the internet of Georgia and Armenia for a few hours when she destroyed a critical cable which links the two countries to the world wide web. That was only with an ax, and by accident.

Wonders what could happen if the attempt had been more deliberate, with more resources available.

Can anyone tell me if there's any theoretical methods to destroy the internet, if one has the resources to do it? And if the internet could not be practically destroyed, at least permanently, is there a way to put it out of commission to a certain area for an extended period of time (e.g. put out of an entire country for a week)?

And what are the consequences for doing something like this?

[TronPaul]

This is an interesting question that's been on my mind as SOPA has drawn closer to becoming law (may it fail). The internet in general has shown itself to be rather robust, but there have been localized downtimes caused by malicious activity. The most major of which occurred in Estonia and was a result of Soviet memorials being taken down [article]. More recently Myanmar was taken offline from a DDOS attack [article]. These DDOS attacks did not greatly effect traffic outside of the target and were facilitated by the fact that the countries in question had few routers. If one were to do the same to the US for example they would need to DDOS all the routers that directly connect to another country to block access. Considering the amount of traffic that would entail, it would be a tall order.

A more realistic way to bring down the entire internet is to somehow cause something similar to a broadcast storm. A broadcast storm is when a broadcast signal or packet is sent and received (perpetuated/duplicated) by many nodes and never dies. This was a problem on local networks back when switches were less prevalent and most local networks used hubs. Routers however do not forward broadcasts so a broadcast storm should never occur. Causing something similar to occur, where devices not under attackers control dumbly broadcast many packets because of a packet or signal sent by attackers would achieve the same effect and would be the easiest way to bring the internet down.

[madd0ct0r]

consequences? Anonymous has a new chew toy.

At the individual level, preventing access is easy but the consequence is negligable

At the software/social level, restricting access is possible, but difficult. Even the great firewall of China has holes and an entire language of euphemisms and puns has been developed to get around the censors. Vietnam's unofficial blocking of facebook is laughably ineffective.

At the infrastructure level - you've got cables. Big, reasonably fragile cables. And server farms and interchanges. And wireless towers (3g). But you'd have to find them and records for this sort of thing are patchy (especially more recent installations like you'd be after, the records will exist, but might not have been filed / archived yet. Or filed under a new format, or be waiting for the bulk scanning contract to start in 6 months, or were mislabelled by the bored student ect). And even then, you'd not know for sure you'd found all of the connections.
Once you break it, of course, it's much easier for the owning company to find and repair. And they've got a HUGE financial incentive to do so.

It is possible to disrupt, damage or annoy the internet. Just not for that long. taking out powercables would probably be faster.

[Ariphaos]

Right now the weakest link in the Internet is the DNS system, and the lack of egress filtering on the part of hosts and ISPs.

In theory, you could go to data centers and exchanges, start blowing them up, or take backhoes to the landscape. It's easy to cut off spokes this way - in South Dakota the western part of the state routinely lost Internet connectivity for the same reason.

But try doing that to a hub city (New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Jose, Denver, Toronto...) and it becomes a different story. These cities host multiple exchanges where connectivity providers drop separate wires in, and every major provider wants in on every major exchange in every major city like that. The locations of said exchanges are not always public knowledge, on top of that. The security in some major data centers resembles what I would expect of a top secret facility.

Destroying the physical infrastructure in the US, Westernish Europe or similarly developed region would be a colossal undertaking. You'd have to do it faster than said organizations can respond, and cutting random wires around the D.C. area can get a response in minutes.

Less developed countries, certainly, even less developed regions (rural U.S.) can be taken out trivially for a time.

Right now, the clearest threat that could permanently disrupt the Internet is by attacking the DNS system. A multi-million machine botnet might be capable of it. It's been tried, twice.

[SpaceMarine93]

I asked this because it had been pointed out to me that it wouldn't be hard to find a capable, spiteful person who would want to bring down the entire internet in retribution for SOPA's passage.

For example, what if someone creates a computer virus which which combines the abilities of:

- Nimda (2004): which could infect your computer from opening a webpage alone, in addition to infecting via email and instant messaging, without even opening attachment.

- Slammer (2003): fastest zombie bot virus in existence, in its opening move it infected 75000 computers in 30 minutes

- Stormbot (2006): One of the deadliest viruses ever. According to Cracked.com, Storm is estimated by some to be responsible for 20 percent of the spam on the Internet, including tens of millions of emails laden with viruses that create more bots. Some experts estimate that the botnet is powerful enough to "muscle entire countries off of the Internet". lobotomizes and re-programs any existing anti-virus software, rendering it harmless. The botnet also has active defenses, and has gone on the offensive and D-DOSed several major anti-spam sites into oblivion. Back in February of 2007, the botnet even attacked the 13 "root" servers that make up the backbone of the Internet's infrastructure. Two of them were severely damaged.
[http://www.cracked.com/article_18453_5- ... z1hv9c5UHW]

And then unleash it onto the internet?

Just saying.

Edit: throw in Code Red II (creates backdoor, disguises as antivirus software), ComWarrior (attacks smartphones), Sesser and Netsky (exploits critical microsoft programming flaw), Leap-A (Attacks Mac)

[dragon]

nah not the whole internet just the portion used by congress and POTUS. Since they use a reserved range of IP's just limit what they do to that range.

[someone_else]

a capable, spiteful person who would want to bring down the entire internet in retribution for SOPA's passage.

Short answer: it's far easier to blow up congress hall than to down the Internet globally.

For example, what if someone creates a computer virus which which combines the abilities of:

Therare some fundamental differences between a virus designed to do A and another designed to do B. Making a omnipotent one is a major pain in the ass since to do every thing must integrate different forms not necessarily compatible with each other. And for "major pain in the ass" I mean it requires a competent and dedicated design team, and probably years of design time.

Also let's not forget that one thing is infecting the computers, one thing is killing internet.

To do the latter you need to have infected real buttloads of stuff, and coordinate a more or less worldwide attack (not so easy, even for the internet).
Since when you downed the beast, the infection can no more spread.

This exposes your UberViruses to scrutiny from MOST OF THE WORLD's antivirus programs, even semi-rogue ones made by geeks, which means generally a HIGH risk of the virus getting caught before it's ready to down the internet, therefore revealed and fucked before you can say jack shit.


So, large design team and large development time and budget, combined with massively risky implementation, to do something that can be undone in weeks (viruses aren't invulnerable, you know).

sounds stupid to me

[CaptainChewbacca]

The closest thing to a nerve center the internet has would be an Internet Exchange Point which are regional hubs which handle a lot of traffic. Taking out one wouldn't do a lot to the internet as a whole, but if you hit 3 or 4 in the US you could start a cascade failure as traffic backs up. I'm not sure how they could be easily disabled though, they're hardened facilities.

[Skgoa]

- Stormbot (2006): One of the deadliest viruses ever. According to Cracked.com, Storm is estimated by some to be responsible for 20 percent of the spam on the Internet, including tens of millions of emails laden with viruses that create more bots. Some experts estimate that the botnet is powerful enough to "muscle entire countries off of the Internet". lobotomizes and re-programs any existing anti-virus software, rendering it harmless. The botnet also has active defenses, and has gone on the offensive and D-DOSed several major anti-spam sites into oblivion. Back in February of 2007, the botnet even attacked the 13 "root" servers that make up the backbone of the Internet's infrastructure. Two of them were severely damaged.
[http://www.cracked.com/article_18453_5- ... z1hv9c5UHW]

[Skgoa]

ghetto edit:

As long as there is telecommunication, there is going to be an internet. (It was around long before the Web bubble began to take of in the nineties.) There can be no doubt about that. But quality of service can be impacted severely (for a while) by targeting the infrastructure itself. E.g. root DNS servers, national backbones, cables under the sea. Satelites just don't have the bandwidth to be more than a drop in the bucket. And if you only want to cause local downtimes, it would be pretty trivial to target ISP's infrastructure. Over here, they put that hardware into boxes on the sidewalks, to have easy access to them. Lighting a few hunderd grams of thermite on top of one (or running it over with a car) could kill the internet for several blocks. It's entirely feasible to attack hundresd or thousands of them at the same time. Nobody would check them for timed devices.

[someone_else]

Over here, they put that hardware into boxes on the sidewalks, to have easy access to them. It's entirely feasible to attack hundresd or thousands of them at the same time.

And you get what? you down internet in a 2-3 km radius after you worked like a damn slave for weeks? Also timers can get expensive when you start buying 1000 or more.

Assuming you don't get caught while planting bombs on one of those boxes.
It's not a very high risk thing to do, but it does carry some, and doing it a gazillion times will eventually lead to a screwup.

It's very useful if you want to tap someone else's connection (illegal) or eavesdrop (illegal), or even shut everything down before storming his house at night (even more illegal), but it's too low level to be a realistic threat.

[AniThyng]

Your nightmare come to life!*

*Yeah I know its ridiculous

[Rabid]

I may be talking out of my ass here, but considering that the modern internet is a direct descendant of ARPANET, which was designed to allow communications between critical facilities even in case of a Nuclear Holocaust, I think it's pretty safe to assume that it is next to impossible to completely disrupt the Internet on a world scale.
The best you could do IMHO is to severely reduce bandwidth and increase latency time on a world scale by (physically) targeting critical facilities (the facilities where the intercontinental cables interconnect with the national grids ; major ISP hubs ; etc...), which will force the data packets to take alternative routes with a far lower capacity ; and having set up a number of different botnets tasked to saturate the remaining bandwidth with useless spam.
But the resources such scenario presuppose are on the scale of a WWIII one, so I don't think we are likely to see something like that soon.

TL;DR : the Internet being an integral part of our modern society, you would have to destroy this modern society to successfully destroy the Internet.

[Alkaloid]

It's more that the internet is not so much a thing as it is a way of communicating, so saying you're going to try and destroy the internet is like saying you are going to destroy the english language. The best you can really do is remove the ablilty of people to talk to each other, but everyone that knew it before still remembers it, and its the same with the internet. You might take servers offline, or cut a cable connecting a certain part of the world to other parts of the world, but they are easy problems to solve, and doing it on the sort of scale that takes all or even a significant number of computers offline for any period of time is not dissimilar to the sort of effort required to isolate all english speakers from all other english speakers.

[Solauren]

To take down the internet, you would need

1 - the resources of a large, modern nation.
2 - Alot of time to figure out how to do it against existing software and technologies. (This would include getting a copy of EVERY SINGLE piece of security software on the planet, as well as all Operating Systems and related software/hardware. Good luck with that).
3 - Keep up to date as new technologies emerge
4 - Come up with something completely unrelated to previous attempts, to avoid any chance of anti-virus software spotting it. (See #2, #3, above)
5 - Hope to hell someone doesn't find out about your plan/efforts via a leak/mole.
6 - Hope to hell that when you unleash the attack, some highly skilled 10 year old hacker doesn't intercept it safely, see what it is, whips up a antidote for it in a few hours, and then sells the cure for billions.

[someone_else]

The surest way would be nukes, and start EMPing the hell outta civilized nations.

If you are a cultist kinda guy, you can pray your god/s to send a solar Superstorm this way. EMP kills (civilian) computers and electronics worldwide.

Yeah i know, gave you another disaster to write a thread about.