How hard would it be to disrupt US access to the internet?

[Fire Walk With Me]

Are there multiple redundancies or are there weak points that could be manipulated by those who wish to halt communication and to increase isolation and fear?

I have no idea of the companies, systems, and hardware involved. I have seen most of the east coast go down from a single power grid problem, and Enron create power embargo's in CA. I am hoping that if anyone wishes to thoroughly isolate us, that the internet isn't that vulnerable.

Tin foil? Sure, but I don't put much past these clowns. They are too highly orchestrated, and interested in taking opportunity to manipulate weak points. (We still haven't found out who sent those anthrax letters, or caught Bin Laden, if he's actually an enemy...they're useful as unsolved problems..)

[havocmom]

1. Would like to hear about this also

Thinkin I should learn about raising carrier pigeons, because I put NOTHING past the crooks who have taken over.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Very easy actually as the root servers (six of them) ARE in the US

turn any of them off and redirect traffic, and you have turned the net off in the US.

Technically turning the net off is not that hard...

[TomInTib]

11. As usual, you are spot-on, nb....

If the Powers That Be decided there would be no non-military internet tomorrow, that's how it would be.

Sure, there would be total chaos but what else is new?

[nadinbrzezinski]

19. I'll blame that damn networking course I took so many years ago

the prof actually covered the root servers... which is usually NOT covered. He worked for cisco systems, and he told us that was the big secret nobody wanted to speak about

[Raster]

27. The root servers should be made triple-redundant and MOVED to safer, secure locations.

Safer, secure, MULTIPLE locations. I'm picturing a lovely little Cheyenne Mountain-esque, hardened bunker underneath the Swiss Alps. There has been concern from other world countries before about the root servers located in the United States. The time for the United States to claim the Internet as its own is OVER! The Internet belongs to the citizens of the world and should be treated as an INTERNATIONAL resource. Servicing and producing the Internet should become somewhat of a "priesthood," if you will. Protection of the Internet should come immediately under the auspices of the United Nations.

[nadinbrzezinski]

30. The last time this came for discussion

other countries, yes you are right, wanted to move at least two of these servers to other places. We said no

I suspect it will happen, when other nations put up their root servers and tell us where to stuff it... and to be honest, I will applaud them for doing that

[Occulus]

32. Actually, I'd prefer the whole shebang be under lucite

In a very public, prominent place.

The more eyes on this prize, the better. I definitely don't want "my" internet under lock and key in a room I'll never see... who knows who could play around with it? Why, someone could splice something off those servers into a hidden little room that other employees are barred from, but which is being spliced in with the telecom companies' blessings...

Oh, wait.

[karlrschneider]

34. It will eventually come under the auspices of whoever has the biggest guns

much like how Antarctica which was mostly above nationalistic claims but now has fallen victim to them.

[northzax]

75. what nationalistic claims in Antarctica?

has someone abrogated the Antarctic Treaty (1959) which puts all territorial claims in abeyance for the duration of the treaty? do tell (cause since I do this for a living, I really should know if someone claimed something recently, and someone should tell the State Department, as of this morning, they had no clue)

want me to check with the Russians for you? the Kiwis? the Argies? OZ?

[Xithras]

61. The UN? Hell no.

The last time anyone discussed getting the UN involved, the diplomatic lackeys at the UN immediately started talking about taxing Internet traffic to fund online "policing", and the imposition of free speech limits (IIRC, a bunch of middle eastern reps wanted international prohibitions against online defamation of Islam). That proposal was quietly forgotten, and millions of Internet users breathed a collective sigh of relief at it. As problematic as our current system is, placing the Internet under the control of appointed bureaucrats who do not answer to the populace and who cannot be overridden by the elected governments of any nation is NOT the answer.

Think about it. If the Internet was run by the UN, America's voice in it's oversight would be in the hands of a Bush appointee. Also remember that of the 167 nations on this planet, only 81 are free and functioning democracies. The rest are dicatorial, monarchal, oligarchal, or have some sort of hybrid government. That's a lot of "un-free" U.N. votes guiding the Internet.

This is why the Internet is still run the way it is. Everyone agrees the current system sucks, but nobody can think of anything better.

[Raster]

63. Good point about the UN. If you noticed, I also advocated a type of Net "priesthood."

A multinational, neutral, organization dedicated to the care, feeding AND PROTECTION of the Internet. I don't know if you're familiar with Tom Clancy's "Net Force" books... something along those lines. It is clear that no one country OR ANY CORPORATE ENTITY should have control over the Internet, and that the Internet has rapidly become the information superhighway of the entire planet. Knowledge must flow. Hyperbole aside, the Internet and its avenues of communication are the best hope for humanity to thrive and prosper. Our very survival as a civilized species is now contingent on an unfettered Internet.

[bean fidhleir]

38. Not quite right, I don't think. They're not traffic servers, they're "phone books"

When we say "take me to democraticunderground.com" they translate that to "take me to 216.158.28.196".

Which is an oversimplification, since when we try to go to some site, it's not a root server that does the name translation, it's some local, ISP-owned nameserver at the second or third or tenth level down from the root. The role of the root server is a central repository for all such name:address mappings. Local servers periodically update their own databases from the "authoritative" database on the root server.

So someone taking out all the root servers would delay getting new names into service, but that's all. The lower-level servers would continue to service requests and things would continue exactly as now.

The only way to badly screw up the system would be to secretly replace the good information in the root databases with bad information, so that when the lower level servers update themselves, they unknowingly replace their still-good information with garbage. Then when people tried to get to DU they'd be sent to Porky's Porno Palace or a fish-and-chips shop in Uganda.

But even that wouldn't really be fatal, because netnerds would pretty quickly designate new, temporary root servers and start rebuilding them from scratch. If everyone worked hard, it would take maybe a day or two to get nearly everything going again.

[Xithras]

59. It's happened before.

It was the mid 90's if I remember correctly, but some guy hijacked the root servers as a form of protest over the old Internic monopoly (the great Alternic hijack). He fed the root servers a root update, that update was mirrored out in under an hour, and much of the country lost Internet access for two weekends in a row. He never said exactly how he did it, but one man brought the Internet to its knees (he was later convicted on several federal counts).

You are actually forgetting something important. Local DNS servers do NOT keep mirrors of the entire DNS structure, but instead simply cache requested URL's for a fixed period of time. Depending on the configuration of the server, those entries either time out after a period, or the cache is updated from the root servers periodically. If you request a URL that neither you nor anyone else in your ISP has requested lately, your ISP's DNS servers are going to query the root to find out what address to refer. If there's no root, you won't connect. Your ISP's DNS servers will keep operating for a period of time without the root, but once it reaches its timeout limit (typically 24 hours or less), it will need to touch the root or its authoritative server again. If those aren't running, your DNS still won't resolve.

As for temporary DNS servers, it isn't just a matter of getting temporary DNS in place. You'd need the complete Internic database from NetSol, the PIR database, and a few others to reconstruct the complete DNS structure. That would take some time to collect. Once that was done, you'd need to update EVERY DNS server at EVERY ISP, school, and company in the country to point at the new root servers. Is it possible? Sure, but imagine if the attack was launched at 6:30PM on a Friday. At the minimum you could throw the Internet offline for an entire weekend. One of the strengths of the Internet is the fact that no one group is in charge of everything. The downside to that, of course, is that no one company or group can bring it back up again if a catastrophic hack actually brought it all down.

[bean fidhleir]

72. I might have a vague memory of the event you mention

or some dns outage, anyway - my memory says it lasted fewer than 24 hours, so perhaps it's not the same one.

Wouldn't you be surprized and dismayed (I would!) to discover that second and third tier NOCs aren't keeping known-good backups of the root hosts db, or their piece of it at least? It's such an obvious thing to do.

[Xithras]

73. That's just it, the entire point of DNS is that nobody has to do that.

First off, there is actually a bit of confusion among people about what the root nameservers actually do. They don't actually contain ANY names or IP's, but simply resolve gTLD's. When you type in "whatever.com" and your ISP's DNS servers don't have it, it pings the root. The root responds with the IP address for VERISIGN'S root name servers...because Verisign is in charge of .Com and actually has that data. The various name root hosts are just big databases that map names within a particular gTLD to nameservers...and there are tens of millions of nameservers on the Internet with tens of thousands of names being added and removed every hour. Data for the .Com and .Net names is managed by Verisign. Data for .ORG is inserted by PIR. .Edu data is inserted by Educause. Mobi resolution information is managed by mTLD. Many of the other extensions are managed by companies or organizations dedicated to those specific TLD's, and each has its own seperate and independent database. When you type in a name, the root servers simply refer you to the appropriate TLD base nameserver.

The thing is, the government would never bother to take down ththe main Internet root servers simply because they COULD be reconstructed. If you wanted to take down the Internet, you wouldn't blow up the root servers because that would be too hard to accomplish. There are 13 of them on the planet, and several have multiple virtualized nodes to protect against just this sort of thing.

What you would do, instead, is walk into Verisigns office and run a 3 second DB update to reset all of the included names under the .Com and .Net registries to 0.0.0.0. Then they'd kick in the .Org office doors and do the same.

DNS is configured to always abide by the data provided by the authoritative server, and no DNS authority exceeds that of the TLD root servers. Once those are updated, there isn't a DNS server in the world that will override it. As for keeping backups, you should be prepared to be suprised and dismayed. Nobody keeps backups of the complete gTLD structure because it's distributed AND because you cannot mirror the database without querying every single domain name on the planet. None of the registries will provide you with a copy of their entire portion of the database because that data is considered private and proprietary (mostly to keep people from using it to harvest SPAM data). The resources involved in individually querying the domains would be huge, and with tens of thousands of changes every day would be a constant battle to keep updated. Even that method has a hole, since there's no public list available right now containing every domain name in use on the Internet...and you'd need that list to query the nameservers from the gTLD roots in the first place. The low level domain systems rely almost entirely on a caching model, where DNS data is stored for a fixed period of time after it's been requested. This is why domain name changes can take time to show up...you have to wait for the old data to cache out. But once the change is made to the root, the rest WILL update once their timeout limits are reached.

If the government took out the Verisign TLD roots, .Com and .Net would go completely offline within 24 hours and there would be little anyone could do about it.

[tavalon]

40. Which is why I have been thinking lately,

that we need to start exchanging other ways to communicate, especially locally. The time will come, I suspect, when the net will go, just like that, and I don't want it to set us back by ten years because we, the great unwashed progressives of this country, put all of our ducks in this basket.

[Greyhound]

44. That would effect the world wide web, but the internet itself is so distributed

that it is almost impossible to stop. Remember that it was originally designed to keep working after multiple nuclear strikes within the country by the USSR.

[Prophet 451]

50. And yet...

When the international community suggested a few months ago that teh root servers should be spread amongst countries for both that reason and so that a single disaster couldn't down the whole system, the reaction on DU was near-universally "they should have put the money into developing another system. It's ours, we're keeping it".

[conservdem]

56. who owns and maintains those root servers and how large a

building does one of these require?

[snooper2]

69. That may have been true in 1990....

lol

[northzax]

74. actually, there are 13

there are six single servers (A,B,D,E,G,H) but the other seven (C,F,I,J,K,L,M) are anycast servers, much harder to take down, since they are built to route traffic around problem areas.

[Demeter]

3. They'd Have To Bring The Entire Country and Most of the West To a Standstill

and I don't think even the most savvy fascist would be willing to do that. Not on purpose, anyway.
They would lose Command and Control.

And terrorists? They pick soft targets.

[Deja Q]

4. And terrorists? They pick soft targets.

Bingo.

[Fire Walk With Me]

6. How much harder to organize resistance if they control the lines of communication?

And how much easier for them to detect resistance?

Yes, I think that they are this Machiavellian, I'm sorry to say. In cases like this, I love being as wrong as is possible for a person to be wrong.

But in case anything like this has crossed their beady little minds, I wonder about how to deal with it. The resulting isolation would be drastic. Imagine if we were reduced to phone calls to transfer information? And they've been tapping phone lines since they got into office.

We certainly can't trust the MSM.

I'm playing devil's advocate on purpose.

[Demeter]

8. Any Official Attempt to Disrupt the Internet Would Hurt The Corporate Masters More

than the ordinary citizen. We don't make money on the Internet. They do. And money is what matters.

Even if they tried it, they would quickly be forced to abandon it.

[juno jones]

13. yes,

think of all those transactions, minute by minutes, banks stocks, information on us, even. It is their livelihood. It is in their interests to keep the tubes open. Otherwise, they lose money. And THAT is after all the raison d'etre for this whole situation.

[Fire Walk With Me]

15. You and Demeter make good points. It IS all about money and the control of resources

so thanks for your perspectives.

Does this effect how they make money on oil and the valuation of rare metals such as gold? If the internet were out, would it effect them?

And worst of all, what if only they had internet? :/

[tavalon]

41. This is a delicate topic you bring up.

Hard to speak to directly without raising flags and talking indirectly about it probably raises just as many flags. I will say that you aren't the only one thinking about this, not by a long shot.

[Fire Walk With Me]

52. By resistance, I mean what we do here, and signing online impeachment petitions,

organizing protests, and most importantly, that with the MSM blackout of protests, the internet lets us know that there are others out there who feel the same way. With the internet, it's easier to write to Congress and to our representatives, and to know what bills and proposals are a threat, and their status. Much less nearly instant discussion regarding the candidates.

Imagine this going away. Or being regulated by the rich.

That it is necessary to even consider these things speaks volumes about BushCo. Personally, I detest violence and ugliness, and think it far more likely for them to be so, than us.

[Xenotime]

5. Not hard. Watch.....................

Just kidding.

[99th_Monkey]

7. Not as likely as Net being totally commercialized to charge big buck$

for "premium" access for the "Have-mores", who would be the only ones able to afford it; and everyone else is frozen out of the action for lack of inability or unwillingness to pay big bucks.

[Demeter]

9. The Premium Prices Wouldn't Be Worth It

because the product would be completely degraded (just like cable TV has been, only moreso. TV is one-way communication, Internet is all-way).

[99th_Monkey]

12. This is already being tried, but so far I think the Dems have blocked it

so for now still we have "net neutrality" but maybe not for long.

"The CEOs of all the largest telecom companies have made clear their intent to
build a tiered Internet with faster service for the select few companies willing
or able to pay the exorbitant tolls."
http://www.savetheinternet.com/=faq

[Edweird]

10. Anybody here remember the "bad old days"? Or am I the only one?

You know, dial up. 2400 baud modems. US Robotics! There were networks back then. Lines of communication. I think the odds of the 'gubmint shutting the web is VERY slim simply because the geeks would go "old school" and that would be much harder to monitor. Here, we think we are anonymous, when in fact, it's all very out in the "open" and easy to see. The last thing they want is a return to BBS.
Just my not-so-humble opinion.

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. If you find a way to get around root servers, let me know

:-)

[Edweird]

23. Hehe...

You set up a BBS, plug your 56k into the phone jack and wait for the calls.

[nadinbrzezinski]

26. You do know what a root server is.. right?

Your BBS, going through your 56K modem still went through them... six of them

[unc70]

51. No, my early systems did not got through them. We had networks before they existed.

They were a lot slower and had far fewer systems. Mail got delivered by one machine calling another, sometimes literally dialing-up the other, and then copying the email files between the two machines along with information about the final destination. Usenet newsgroups were just special types of email using a method developed at Duke and UNC about 30 years ago. (The earliest networks I helped implement were in 1967-68; the first third-party networking "product" we did was in 1974. It still works on machines that I own!)

All of this mechanism still works and can be configured on many environments, particularly easy on Linux/Unix/VMS. I still use it sometimes when traveling when I don't want to risk using a full IP connection using PPP.

The routing information was in "bang" format, because "bang" is slang for exclamation point. For example, the DNS format [e-mail] might be represented as unc!abc!xyz or something similar. Before this Unix-style, there were other naming systems derived from NSFnet or various military and government networks. The email system today can still convert between these varied formats when delivering messages. These give special meaning to characters like %, ", and :

[nadinbrzezinski]

54. You are right, to a point

but think about this... how many people will do that, or have a clue on how to do that?

Hell, many people no longer have land lines (you need them), and some computers no longer come with a modem either.

So recreating the BBS system will be a tad hard.

(and my eyes hurt just from thinking USENET... of course if need be, well it will happen, at least with the undeweb... (In the fiction I write the underweb is exactly that a parallel system, highly distributed and all that)

[unc70]

55. Who could rebuild alternatives? Baby Boomers not ready to get over themselves

We designed and built all this stuff to begin with and still know how all the "grandfathered" technology works, who know how to install and maintain copper telephone circuits, program around and through switching systems, who still have ARRL handbooks and RCA receiving tube manual and remember how to use them. I can still make a microphone out of a couple of razor blades, pencil lead, and a shoe box; or convert that All American Five radio into something more interesting, particularly with the mike; or maybe put up a data link all powered off a couple of car batteries.

[nadinbrzezinski]

57. Remind me where I can get all them circuits and other electronics?

Last time I walked into a radio shack, the place didn't have as much stuff as it used to

Can it be done? Yep... but it is not as easy as you are making it sound... at all

Damn I am sorry at this point I threw my 300 baud modem a while ago.

[unc70]

58. My attic, office, storage unit, lots of places

Check out most anyone's closets, attics, garage. You could scavenge much of this stuff most everywhere. I still have all of this type stuff and a lot of other things, all of it still working.

[nadinbrzezinski]

60. Many of us don't... and I just got rid of an ancient 286 AT

Now one laptop still has a modem, but you still have to answer this... if I don't have no land line....

And many younger kids don't

[unc70]

62. Land lines are a good thing. Some cell phones do modems. Radio ultimately.

It would depend how far down in the technology you had to go. Almost none of the telephone-based solutions would be very secure, although better than much of the IP traffic. Ultimately, you start sending data over radio signals. Probably a good time to see what a data-aware base station costs. Don't hold a ticket these days, might have to throttle it back to hobbyist mode for testing.

BTW a series of "local" wireless points using the Linux-based Linksys routers can be used to interconnect and relay over quite a large area. With the right software, they become moderately interesting when combined with some of the other technologies.

Cell phones are a problem. Older ones are totally insecure, later ones mostly insecure. Some could handle modems, particularly the older analog ones that won't be supported much longer. The newer ones are convenient tracking devices (with GPS) and can be enabled to secretly eavesdrop. (Can also do that with your computer using Shockwave Flash, even if you know to disable the mike and camera in the Flash security settings.)

[nadinbrzezinski]

64. You do realize that we left a bunch of readers behind a while ago

as to radio... having used radio as an ambulance worker, there are issues as well

(I used to be a radio dispatcher as well and had to make that damn ancient piece of ^((^*() work. Of course I can also tell a funny story due to atmospherics and waves bouncing off... I got to dispatch Oceanside PD, while they got to dispatch my ambulances in Tijuana... now talk of atmospherics gone haywire!... We ended switching to tactical channels on both sides)

Now back to radio issues, they have to do with security as well as jamming, but you could say that for any wireless network... such as the lynkis.. and yes they can be encrypted, but still... I have a nice neighbor that blows through any encryption... for example.

By the way, playing devil's advocate because I realize that if ANY government wants to shut down a democracy movement the web is but one place to start....

In reality we may have to rely on an even older technology... paper and printing press.

:-)

hell even a pen.

Of course I am going through the worst case scenario... but I learned a while ago, plan for the worst, hope for the best

[unc70]

66. Just a "Journey to the Heaviside Layer"

How to really cover great distances in a couple of hops.

Pretty soon I will start talking in near gibberish about SWL, SSB, and five by five.

Agree we left most everyone else somewhere else. We probably said all we should in open forums.

[nadinbrzezinski]

67. :-)

[unc70]

68. Forgot about printers/copiers being "bugged"

Several warnings about your garden variety ink-jet printer. They are bugged several ways.

1. They can be made to send electronic copies outside your home/office by "phoning home". They send various info back when they can. Monitor you network to see some of this.

2. Most of them print a hidden "watermark" on every page printed or copied. These are very faint yellow dots which identify the source of every page! Just what every police state wants to have.

Might need to find an old mimeograph (not a fluid duplicator).

BTW Did you see the movie "The Lives of Others"?

[nadinbrzezinski]

70. No did not see that movie

and I was thinking mimeograph...

[Crabby Appleton]

25. keep a list at hand of the raw IP addresses you consider important

for instance 216.158.28.195 (put 216.158.28.195 or http://216.158.28.195/ in your browser address bar) may come in handy. Also, there are some alternate private DNS servers available, might want get some raw addresses now before you need them, just in case.

[nadinbrzezinski]

28. I will repeat myself

the Thirteen root servers the US government controls, the true origin of Darpa net, have all traffic in the world.

Why do you think other nations want to move at least one of them OUT of the Us, and the US insists on them remaining in the US at all times.

Edited for the number of servers, oh my we have grown... but they are all still in the US... physically that is

[WillyT]

31. Wouldn't This Bring Down The Entire Financial Market Too ???

Don't almost all money transactions go across the wires these days?

:shrug:

[nadinbrzezinski]

45. You can configure it so THEY are NOT affected

AT&T proved that when they were copying all traffic out of a single room

You can have traffic coming from select places going to root servers that are left on, while you and me can be shut off

It is not that hard

[Raster]

33. Thank you for the information. I have found your posts to be cautionary and informative.

I've watched certain parties on this board label you as a reactionary and your posts as hyperbole. I say consider the source. Rock on! Thank you.

[nadinbrzezinski]

48. Well those who know history are at times seen as reactionary

hell Hanah Arendt describes that in the banality of evil. In the end she was right, and many who called her reactionary and full of hyperbole... were dead.

I don't want that result, but that is certainly a possibility.

[Crabby Appleton]

35. 13 addresses refered to as "servers" - actually > 100 physical sites,

http://www.root-servers.org/

This aspect is much more robust than it use to be, many routers associated with DNS server addresses are configed to listen on an address and switch to the standby server (on the same IP address) if a DNS server becomes unreachable; many of the standby DNS root servers are located out of the US. If you want to take down the net you can 1) currupt DNS and/or in-addr.arpa tables, or 2) or put the system into congestive collapse with 'bots with malformed headers, for example. If you want to be prepared this sort of event, save your important raw IP address, and an alternate public or private DNS resolver (the raw IP address, not the DNS name).

There are a large number of public and private DNS servers (which of course could become currupted)

Public DNS Servers
ns1.de.opennic.glue (Cologne, DE)
217.115.138.24
ns1.jp.opennic.glue (Tokyo, JP)
219.127.89.34
ns2.jp.opennic.glue (Tokyo, JP)
219.127.89.37
ns1.nz.opennic.glue (Auckland, NZ)
202.89.131.4
ns1.uk.opennic.glue (London, UK)
194.164.6.112
ns1.phx.us.opennic.glue (Phoenix, AZ, US)
63.226.12.96
ns1.sfo.us.opennic.glue (San Francisco, CA, US)
64.151.103.120
ns1.co.us.opennic.glue (Longmont, CO, US)
216.87.84.209
ns1.ca.us.opennic.glue (Los Angeles, CA, US)
67.102.133.222
bigguy.gte.net
206.124.64.1
ns1.granitecanyon.com
205.166.226.38
ns2.granitecanyon.com
69.67.108.10
nl.public.rootfix.net - Nederlands
199.166.29.3
NS1.QUASAR.NET - Orlando, FL, USA
199.166.31.3
SpeakEasy Nameservers
66.93.87.2
216.231.41.2
216.254.95.2
64.81.45.2
64.81.111.2
64.81.127.2
64.81.79.2
64.81.159.2
66.92.64.2
66.92.224.2
66.92.159.2
64.81.79.2
64.81.159.2
64.81.127.2
64.81.45.2
216.27.175.2
66.92.159.2
66.93.87.2
Sprintlink General DNS
204.117.214.10
199.2.252.10
204.97.212.10
Cisco
128.107.241.185
192.135.250.69
ns1.mailworx.net
69.1.200.68
usenet.net.nz
202.49.59.6
zbasel.fortytwo.ch
193.138.215.60
ns.second-ns.de
213.133.105.2
ns2.your-server.de
213.133.106.251

[nadinbrzezinski]

46. Once again, you turn those off, you turn off the net

why nations have been trying to get some of these servers OUT of the US for some time now

[Wiley50]

21. Might be nice to have a DU BBS for backup. Our modems are much faster now anyway.

Of course, they could always block the phone line

[Edweird]

24. If the phone lines are cut......

well, then the manure has really impacted the ventilation system.

[nadinbrzezinski]

29. Here you go, info on these suckers and oh my mistake we are up to 13

all physically located in the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver

[L0oniX]

14. There are botnets of thousands which can all be given a command to packet any server anywhere.

I used to have a 28 botnet which operated on hacked EDU servers and others. I used to knock IRC users on the servers for fun.I used to DOS their home computer connections if they really pissed me off. You can make all the bots in a botnet send packets to any ip address with one command line execution. The Romanians used to be the kings of botnets with thousands of bots hosted by thousands of hacked servers including cable and fiber connected home and business computers. They almost took down the Undernet 4 years ago. They have used their botnet to hold certain corporation websites hostage for money. I have no doubt they can take down any US server, if not by packet DOS attacks then by implant and other forms of hacks. We who in the old days of the inet have known the power of botnets since 1994 so I can only guess just how far they have gone today with hacks and botnets but I am confident that they can take down any server and or servers that they wish to. Just Google botnet or botnets or DOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/398/1
http://hack.dublu.ro/index.html

[Fire Walk With Me]

16. Thanks for the information!

[truedelphi]

17. Most of us in the USA don't know this but the entire nation of Estonia

Went down last May due to cyber hacking of the internet there.

In Estonia, people do almost everything on the internet. For instance, in Estonia prior to this major hack, there was much less resistance to banking online (I don't nbank online, nor do most of my friends.)

I followed the story for awhile, but quit following it right around the time that reports on what happened to the Estonian economy came out. However, I can't imagine that there was much good news.

[northzax]

18. Estonia is a different situation

it was a much smaller system with few entry points. It was more like closing an offramp on a highway. Or creating a traffic jam. It's east to block traffic on one or two roads, now imagine trying to create a traffic jam on every road in the US, simultaneously. While also preventing any off-road traffic, planes, trains, bikes, anything. And then imagine that almost all traffic, anywhere in the world, goes thhrough the US. How long would the rest of the world allow that to happen before finding another route? Not long. Within a day, there would be other root servers up and running. You could slow down the net for a day or so, but not stop it for long. And why would the genius geeks at the Internet firms stand for it without finding workarounds? all those geniuses at google, microsoft, at universities, and companies you never heard of who are getting rich, or hope to? No way.

[Pavulon]

22. Considering the system was designed to survive a

global thermonuclear exchange, pretty difficult. Not saying it cant be done but it would take a bit of effort...

Willingness to be sent to prison or just be the next gerald bull.

[unc70]

36. Several different things being discussed and confused

First, the root domain name servers resolve things line democraticunderground through the .com root. This information is cached all over the place, but is ultimately required to resolve symbolic names to IP addresses. There have been several distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) using botnets to flood these addresses with too much traffic. Hijacking this name resolution is another common trick; so that bankofamerica.com or bankofarnerica.com resolve somewhere in the ukraine or china. Sometimes the attacks start by attacking the network time protocol servers (e.g. Naval Observatory).

The second set of vulnerable points are the few places where the major parts of the backbone of the net intersect (e.g. SF Bay area, northern VA). While a physical attack at one or more of the crossover points could be quite disruptive, the net could survive, terribly degraded. Note that a single explosion in the cabling near Wall Street would probably be more damaging. The incidental comm damage after the WTC attacks caused severe problems.

There are other more-distributed attacks (for example, disabling Cisco routers), that can have considerable damage obvious disruption and denial of service.

The more effective attacks are the ones that remain undetected for long periods of time and allow gaining control of the the power distribution or similar systems.

These battles are going on every day, particularly on a Saturday night, 24x365. Most of it is just criminal, but a lot is gov related. Nothing can really be secured with any confidence these days. How sure can you be about the hardware you are using to build your systems?

[truedelphi]

37. Your discussion is very valuable in helping to understand the overall picture.

[nadinbrzezinski]

47. You are correct

but I am not talking about your average "terrarist" pulling off a Denial of Service attack (which some suspect was behind the 1997 power problems in Cali), but the government turning the net off if they thought it would benefit them.

If that is the case, it is so damn easy (technically speaking) that they will laugh all the way to the bank

Hell, to push the privatization of the internets I will not be too shocked if we start seeing those kinds of games.

[Perry Logan]

39. Isn't it amazing how quickly the internet has become central to almost everything?

[L. Coyote]

42. Servers, routers, etc. in the end depend on electricity. How secure is the power?

[unc70]

43. The power distributiion system has become very insecure.

In the old days, computerized power systems used VAX/VMS and similar operating systems with high levels of security built-in and with private networking systems. Then came the push for the use of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) systems -- translated to mean Microsoft and Intel. (The same thing has happened with government and military systems.)

Most of the control systems for power transmission and distribution are now using software on MS Windows systems, much like the typical office or home. While they might be on an isolated network, they are still susceptible to many of the problems and the attacks that plague home and office systems. A technician somewhere attaching their infected laptop to a "protected" network is all that is required to disable critical systems. This is not a hypothetical example; several real instances. A mono-culture is risky in biology and in other complex systems.

Too many of the people making decisions in these critical areas are oblivious to the problems they are causing. They are often too young and lack the institutional memory to even remember the problems that earlier systems were engineered to solve.

I have been in the computer world since 1964, roughly the same that I have been a liberal activist. Many of my concerns are very similar in each arena -- the cocksure attitude of decision makers, the less they know, the more confident they become.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

49. I've seen backbone problems slow the U.S. network to a crawl.

Granted, it hasn't happened to my knowledge for a while, but it HAS happened and it can easily happen again- by hook OR by crook.

I'm sure there's a plan to implement it if they get too frightened of us.

[kineneb]

53. locally- have large tree fall on the power/phone/cable lines

and cause the neighboring power pole to snap off in the middle.

It happened down the block yesterday. The power went off around 2:30 pm. After working all night, in the cold, hard rain, PG&E removed the old pole, installed a new one and got all the electrical wiring going. This morning the phone co. and cable co. were out reattaching their lines.

I had one of those moments when I realized how dependent we are on electricity and other parts of the infrastructure. No lights, no central heating, no hot water, no cable internet (the phone still worked); only the windup radio Mom gave me for the holidays. On the other hand, I have bunches of candle lanterns and candles, as well as an oil lamp, so we had light. The range runs on propane, so we had burners. But... take away the kerosene, and propane... and things might be rather different. Perhaps a wood stove as backup would not be such a bad idea... hmmm.

[dawniedarling]

65. OK so, what to do about it..

We must do something other than quake and wring hands

[KansDem]

71. Ask Al...he invented it!

He should know...

:sarcasm: