Just assume that on one fine sunny day you wake up, have your tea and try to log into Facebook or Gmail and you find that you can’t reach it. It sounds very weird right. But, according to a security researcher, some strange entity is already working on bringing down the whole Internet.
Someone Is Trying To Take Down The Entire Internet
In the last two years, someone has been testing the defences of the companies that manage Internet key parts. It is precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine to what extent these companies are able to defend itself and what it takes to overcome the defences, as said security expert Bruce Schneier digital.
In his column blog lawfare, the expert writes that companies that provide basic Internet infrastructure have recently seen an increase in denial of service attacks (DDoS), which start at a certain level, then intensify before stopping. A week later renewed the level reached and continue.
“And so, similarly to if the attacker was looking for a weak point exactly,” he said.
Attacks are configured to show you all the defences of the attacked company. The more attack vectors are used simultaneously, more diverse defences should be used.
“This means that companies have to use everything they have to defend themselves and can not be saved nothing in reserve. They are obliged to show all their abilities to the attacker,” said Schneier.
The expert does not reveal the names of the companies under attack, saying he was asked to remain anonymous, but cited a similar to the American company Verisign report, operating a variety of network infrastructures including two of the thirteen root name servers of Internet, in addition to the authoritative registry for domain generic top-level .com, .net and .name.
Schneier believes that such attacks appear surveillance operations or intelligence gathering more own scale of a State or of any criminal activist group.
“It seems a military cyber command trying to gauge its arsenal in case explodes cyberwarfare. This reminds me of an American program of the era of Cold War to fly with planes at high altitudes the USSR to force it to put on alert its air defences in order to test their capabilities ,” he said.
The expert is not sure about the source of the attacks. Although “the data point to see China, on the other hand, it is possible to disguise the country of origin in such attacks,” he further added. So, in case you wake up one day to find out that the Internet in the entire world has failed like Schneier says, then you know whom to blame.
