Teh Internets are defended

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized

December 16th, 2008

While doing some research about the currently active root nameservers on the Internet, the obvious end-of-the-world question popped up - "What if they went offline?" - the answer is even more obvious - panic, loss of monetary funds, inability to lurk Facebook profiles, etc. would quickly arise, thus setting a short timed ultimatum for the people in charge... What to do?

The servers themselves can rarely die all at once, since they are distributed across the world while redundancy is maintained, also they are running only BIND (or NSD), so the only attack on these kinds of data centers would only be possible through a DDoS method. A tiny number of these kinds of attacks has been registered, but a few of them were powerful enough to knock a significant count of these servers...

What I knew: These servers are serious business. They are hosted on only the finest and in most protected environments available. A few of them are maintained by the US military and the US Defense Information Systems Agency, so an attack attempt on any of them would be a pretty good reason to declare insanity on the offending party. If any attack should take place, the country of origin will do anything in their power to apprehend the attacker and neutralize him.

What I found out: According to Mark Hall (some guy from the US Defense Department), not only will the US retaliate when any of these attacks are initiated, but is fully prepared to physically remove the threat if the attacking country refuses to cooperate, and if it is impossible to produce any other peaceful disconnection procedure. We're talking real high explosive here, and I quote:

The Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source.

Wow... Well, as much as I would like to see the face on a no-life basement geek while getting his botnet DoS attack interrupted by a low-charge air to surface missile, I do hope that nobody attempts to cripple the world wide web in any way, since (fortunately) people are willing to keep it free and active, no matter what. Say what you want about US attack policies, but I would pull the trigger myself on the bastard who can even think of distinguishing the most free network on the face of the planet, and beyond.

Slap a smile on an old gadget Joy to the world