Privacy News Hackers Learning How To Shut Down Internet

[Terry Ganzi]

A security expert has warned that a group of hackers is attempting to see if it’s possible to bring down the internet completely.

According to Bruce Schneier writing in a blog post, hacker collectives, most likely to have been sanctioned by either China or Russia, is testing the defences of companies that run critical parts of the Internet.
“Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services… What can we do about this? Nothing, really. We don’t know where the attacks come from.”

The attacks on crucial structural links of the internet have been steadily increasing over time, and are consistently trying to find a weak point they can breach in order to try and bring it down.

“We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses,” writes Schneier. “These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.”

These type of attacks, according to Schneier, are uncharacteristic behaviour of normal hackers. Instead, they do resemble the core profiling activity of basic infrastructure that is commonly seen in espionage and intelligence gathering.

You can read the rest of the news here at: Hackers Learning How To Shut Down Internet |

 

[exCode]

That article was actually really interesting to read. Imagine the possibilities, though. ;o

 

[Myriad]

Reading this reminded me of the live animated global attack map from Norsecorp .
It claims to show the source and targets of cyber attacks in real-time.

It's certainly very impressive looking , but I'm not sure if I believe it .

 

[frogboy]

Man that would not be good at all, life would get boring very fast with nothing to do, no MT.

 

[LabZero]

I don't know if this is possible, but certainly a shutdown just in the USA would mean the collapse of all of the DNS servers and the global repercussions would be devastating.

 

[Myriad]

I respect the author and have been reading his stuff for a long time , but saying
"-- points to state actors " doesn't make it a fact .

It may be evidence , but it's not proof , and if I were a nation state considering such an attack ,
I would be taking extra steps to make sure that another state would get the blame .

As for the attack method I can see why they might choose DDoS , multiplied up to a massive scale ,
but the sheer number of servers that would have to be attacked is mind boggling .
It would need a botnet that was orders of magnitude bigger than anything seen so far .

The more obvious attack method would be on the OS of the servers themselves , but the vast majority are running Linux
( Oops , I meant GNU/Linux ) , so that makes a potential attacker's task much harder , thankfully !