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Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

lawfareblog.com

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Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#11

Post by M_Grey »

grokas wrote: post #4
M_Grey wrote: post #2

This is both unsurprising, and worrying. Unsurprising because it's the job of any nation's military and espionage arms to consider and form plans to cripple or destroy their potential enemy's infrastructure, information included. Worrying, because as far as I can tell most people remain deeply ignorant and/or unconcerned (present company excluded both from that remark, and realistically the descriptor "most people")…

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He certainly is, although too often I wish that wasn't the case. For instance, right now I wish that very much!

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#12

Post by jameshart »

Panino wrote: post #7
angrydev wrote: post #3

Can anyone elaborate on what he means when he says that Verisign can 'go down' and take down most of the internet with it? How would a registrar going down affect anything to do with actual hosts?

Poor wording. Verisign operates .com for the US government. So if Verisign's .com servers were to go down, then .com would go down with them. The author shouldn't have used the word "registrar" which makes people think of the creation of new domain names, à la GANDI (good) or GoDaddy (bad).

Indeed. The term for the manager of a TLD, as Verisign is for .com and .net, is a 'domain registry', not registrar.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#13

Post by Bartweiss »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #9
sgnelson wrote: post #5

Makes me wonder if we'll ever see a "hot" war that starts off as a "cyber" war.

If you see a hot war, under current circumstances it will almost certainly be preceded (if only for a few minutes) by a full-on cyber attack.

It's an interesting arrangement. Launching a cyber war for its own sake might or might not escalate to a hot conflict, but a hot conflict would almost certainly be backed by the cyber version.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#14

Post by increment_i »

grokas wrote: post #4
M_Grey wrote: post #2

This is both unsurprising, and worrying. Unsurprising because it's the job of any nation's military and espionage arms to consider and form plans to cripple or destroy their potential enemy's infrastructure, information included. Worrying, because as far as I can tell most people remain deeply ignorant and/or unconcerned (present company excluded both from that remark, and realistically the descriptor "most people")…

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#15

Post by goda90 »

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-community communication in case the Internet goes down. Yes, it'd be great if everyone was self hosting, using distributed services and involved in a mesh network now, but without motivation it won't happen. So this club could focus on developing the resources that a few individuals in a community could use to set these things up after the network is already down. They could have offline caches of Wikipedia and Openstreetmaps, copies of firmware, apps and instructions for attaching consumer routers and other Wi-Fi devices to a mesh network, systems for registering people with a locally functioning email address, etc. User friendly portals could be made that provide the basic instructions for people who stumble on a mesh network access point with their otherwise disconnected smartphones.

All of the tech exists in some form or another, but if it were well packaged, it's not hard to see there being a sufficient distribution of members to get people connected easily.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#16

Post by asclepi »

So how exactly is one entity, even a state entity, going to take down all 13 root servers, assuming that that is what Schneier is talking about since the man speaks in mysteries? What would it take to do that?

Let's safely assume that these servers, every single one of them, are subject to DDoS attacks all the time and have at least some experience in handling them, and have a backup scenario ready for a serious attack. One of the reasons why the root servers are not centralized is to avoid the kind of disaster that Schneier predicts.

Also what if I maintain a list of IP addresses of the websites I visit most and update that list daily. When the "big attack" strikes, I put that list in /etc/hosts. Would I still be able to do my holiday shopping from Amazon? Would I still be able to read the logs on my VPS by ssh'ing to its IP? How long would such an attack sustain before BGP modifications start blackholing the sources? Long enough to let the average TTL cache expire?

Would an attack on the root servers really take down the internet? Or in case Schneier isn't talking about that, what kind of attack on the decentralized internet is actually able to take it all down? I'm not saying he is wrong, but I have a hard time thinking about how we should prepare and protect our infrastructure if he doesn't want to share the intel he knows instead of some generic warnings.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#17

Post by WorldMaker »

increment_i wrote: post #14
grokas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

Or vice versa? The internet relies disproportionately enough on American backbones/services that an American agency doesn't need to probe because it already has the keys, or at least the power switch?

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#18

Post by exolymph »

increment_i wrote: post #14
grokas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

It would be profoundly stupid for the American government to take down the internet under normal circumstances, but then against it would be equally stupid for China or Russia to do it (again, under normal circumstances). But developing the capability seems like a good idea of the face of it.

That said, Schneier obviously has more information than he's currently sharing.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#19

Post by hackuser »

increment_i wrote: post #14
grokas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

Following on what M_Grey says, I'd say beyond a doubt the U.S. military plans to take down any and all Internet infrastructure as needed as a contingency in war.

Remember the U.S. government has plans to effectively destroy the world with nuclear strikes as a contingency in war. Do you think they would hesitate to prepare plans to take down a data network? It's immoral? Unthinkable?

I'm not criticizing such plans. War is death and destruction, and the U.S. must be prepared.

The U.S., and all nations and citizens, also should do everything to prevent situations where war is the best remaining option. This requires sober, expert foresight in foreign policy and politics, anticipating 2nd-, 3rd-, and n-order effects, not emotional, knee-jerk ideology and amateur foreign policy.

Re: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

#20

Post by 1_800_UNICORN »

increment_i wrote: post #14
grokas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'the author' (Bruce Schneier) is right a lot.

He suspects China or Russia as the likely culprit. What exactly rules out an American agent? Is it because American economic and social activity rely disproportionately on internet backbones more so than other state actors? If so, that would be especially interesting.

I was wondering the same thing. My assumption would be that either:

1) The US has nothing to gain by taking down the internet infrastructure via malicious means.

or

2) The US has better access to these systems to take them out directly rather than forcing them down via DDOS attacks.

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