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Ask HN: What does a fatal attack on the internet look like?

2 points by lifeinthevoid ↗ HN
I've always been worried about the fragility of infrastructure in the scenario of a real war. I'm under the impression that it wouldn't be too hard for e.g. Russia to take down the European power grid with a cyber attack. In the last couple of years Russia has been spending effort to disconnect from the global internet, and thus the following question naturally arises: "What does a fatal attack on the global internet look like and how feasible is it"?

6 comments

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belter
It's very feasible. It's spelled BGP but you would need a distributed team to pull it off. Since I am pro internet wont provide here the details. Same way why a physicist should not go into the full subtle details required to construct a nuclear device :-)

In other words, if you need to ask, then you are not the person who should know.

RadiozRadioz
I imagine it would look similar to the effects of the CrowdStrike incident earlier this year. The feasibility of an attack of that nature is definitely high; it is commonplace for software to download updates unattended, an attacker need only compromise one trusted company to spread their code across the globe.
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beardyw
The internet was conceived at the hight of the cold war to be resilient, enabling local networks to function if disconnected. I am sure that in our race to make it more sophisticated that idea has been compromised, but I think basic operation could be re-established reasonably quickly.