In a nutshell: The head of a large russian anti-virus site predicts that cyber-terrorists will shut down most of the internet tomorow.
>>;; yikes.
My opinion:
It sort of sounds like bullshit, but i dont know if you remember the attack earlier in the summer. Someone hit ‘AkaMai’ technologies with a DDoS attack, and it slowed down traffic all over the net for hours. So it could happen. Also, recently, cisco systems had it’s IOS12 mainframe router OS source stolen. That really would mean nothing, because usually no one bothers to actually attack the infrastructure of the internet, but in a large scale attack it would be done. Also, one of the ways cisco kept its routers safe after a security flaw was found a little while back (BGP peering-session), was to encode it with MD5 and SHA encode and encryption. These algorythms were just broken.
Guess i’ll just have to go outside, or hang out with my friends tomorow. *shivers at the thought.
Shutting down the internet! Those bastards! As protest I shall do what I do every day, try to beat all the games on my computer in one day. They won’t get me outside, that’ll show 'em.
I don’t believe that this will happen. It takes a LOT to shut down the entire internet- because there are so damned many parts to it that it would be hard to take down.
Yeah, what Loki said. But they could create some kind of fast-spreading virus of sorts that hits all parts at once, and doesnt activate until their’ ALL in place… ah whatever. Not likely to happen either way.
Late yesterday afternoon, your assessment was updated to advise that the alleged attack, set for political and financial services today, was not believed to be valid. Our staff was not able to obtain any cooberative evidence to support such a claim, and many media feeds are now reporting that no observable threat has been detected. It appears that initial reports were possibly taken out of context and when coupled with increased media attention, caused many organizations to react to a threat that did not exist.
It could happy, but it’s not likely. The undertaking to shut down the net would be far beyond most people or organizations. However, hysteria works much better. Methinks the “I Love You” virus was damaging, but more powerful was the fear of being infected.
Why do you all seem to think it would be really hard to take down the internet? Earlier in the summer <i>one</i> routing/traffic company AkaMai (sp) was hit and taken down, and it slowed net traffic <i>all over</i> for hours.
Yeah, I’m afraid of the nerd branch of terrorism.