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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Cyberattack FUD
Well said - the radical elements get a lot more bang for their buck with well placed media stories, than they would ever likely get from a cyber attack on the Internet. The one point to consider is that there are critical networks for the economy that run on shared infrastructure also used by the Internet. Hence studying the susceptibility of the Internet can be more than an exercise is guarateeing porn availability. Proprietary issues aside there is a lot to be learned and for fairly good reasons. Micro-biologists study the neural network of the c.elgans worm not because they give a crap about worm brains but because it gives insight to a bigger picture. Not the best analogy but ya get the drift. ----- Original Message ----- From: William Waites <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 8:35 pm Subject: Re: Cyberattack FUD > > >>> "Kurt" == Kurt Erik Lindqvist <[email protected]> writes: > > Kurt> I am not sure what you mean with 25% of the Internet? What > Kurt> connectivity would degrade? From where to where? > > If you randomly select nodes to remove, by the time you have removed > 25% of them, the network breaks up into many isolated islands. As Sean > pointed out, the CAIDA study considered a sample of the 50k most > connected nodes. So a successful attack aimed at 12500 big routers > simultaneously would break the Internet into little pieces. > > If more strategy is used in the selection process, you get localized > outages -- i.e. disabling everything in 60 Hudson or 151 > Front is > likely to cause significant problems in New York or Toronto but you'll > probably be able to see the rest of the world just fine from > Sweden. > > A distributed physical attack against a large number of Telco Hotels > and trans-oceanic fibre landing points would be somewhat > worse. It > would also be very difficult to do from a laptop. > > With the exception of E911 service (which normally doesn't > use IP > anyways), any such disruption is unlikely to really hurt anyone. Such > hand-wringing whenever someone threatens to break the Internet > is > maybe a sign of an unhealthy dependence on a medium that is younger > than most of the people on this list? > > Taking the fear mongering and sabre rattling too seriously is much > more dangerous than any possible network outage. > > -w > >
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