Taking down the Internet

[which doctor]

I'm just curious. Would it be possible for a person or group(with a lot of resources) to disable the internet? Or would this be hard considering there is no one point at which all internet traffic goes through.

If someone was able to do this, it would pretty much send the whole world into panic.

So, possible or impossible?

[ComradeOm]

Based on my very limited knowledge... I highly doubt it.

But it begs the question as to why?

[which doctor]

Not that I would ever do this. I live on the internet. When people ask me my address, I give my IP address.

However, doing an act like this would put you in the history books and make you famous.

[ComradeRed]

Suspicious such a question is asked when RevLeft is having net problems... :P

[apathy maybe]

No.

But you could take down the root DNS servers, which would render the WWW almost unusable. (This has been attempted using DDOS attacks. Another way would be to have teams of people to actually physically take them out. Or see the option below.)

Actually you could set off a serious of nuclear bombs high in the atmosphere to generate lots of electromagnetic pulses that would wipe out most electronic devices. A side effect would be to hit the Internet hard.

China seems to be having a good time restricting access to parts of the WWW. But if everyone used encryption for everything then the distributed nature of the Internet would make shutting down some things (such as email) very hard.

[Zero]

Yes.

Destroy backbone ISPs, and remove all telecommunications companies.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Well, the internet did develop from a communications system used by the military that could still work despite being bombed.

[dannie]

the internet is still way to decentralised for this to happen. you would have to take out every isp on the planet to take it down, which isn't possible

[Janus]

No, no one can take down the Internet. They could take down portions of it but it has simply grow way beyond that point.

[Commie Rat]

By taking out everysingle root server, data storage facility and backbone ISP you could, but the amout of time and energy needed to do would similtaneous worldwide strikes, possible, but not practical.

Matter of fact, New Zealand has only 2 backbone ISP's, and a little while ago, on was off for maintenace, and the other was picked up by a back hoe.

[the_last_straw]

Well, one person or a group of less than 15 could take down all the DNS servers and disconnect the Western Hemisphere from the East. You can't take down the internet at this point by targeting specific systems. If you wanted to take down the internet, you could create a worm that used a variety of discovered and undiscovered exploits that would spread like wildfire and create tons of traffic everywhere it went. (Perhaps having it ping random IPs or something)

[Janus]

But that still would not take down the entire Internet, just portions of it. It take massive resources and a gargantuan coordinated attack to shut it down for a time.

[the_last_straw]

Actually, I think it could be very effective to have a traffic-generating worm (althought I'm not sure what you'd accomplish by shutting down the internet.) Every computer is reachable by every computer (unless they are behind a censoring firewall/nat in which case the firewall/nat will die). If the worm was constantly transferring random encrypted data to copies of itself, it could effectively render the internet useless (and would certainly shut down the backbones). However, once a filter was put in place at the backbones all would slowly return to normal so you could expect to have "internet downage" for about 4-5 days max.

[Commie Rat]

Trying to shut it down using a virus ect would be a moot point, as filters and such would be made to stop these fairly quickly, as previously mentioned, the internet is quite robust. You would need to PHYSICALLY destory the main point of which data passes, which is highly impractial