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A layman's question but how vulnerable is the www? If, say Russia or China wanted to finish us off they would only need to disable the web and all of us would be in deep poop as nothing could happen any more.
Should I add this to the list of anxieties that are crippling me or should I worry about something more likely such as getting cancer or some stress-related disease or a fraudster stealing my money or the bank going tits-up?
Do you want the short answer or the long answer? Do you mean the web or the Internet? Would you like to be reassured or frightened?
Internet, tricky. Web, tricky, but not as tricky as the Internet.
Er... I thought the web was the internet!
And no, my anxiety levels are off the scale anyway so try to reassure me, not worry me.
Worry about something else, the very nature of the internet means you can't just turn it off.
A more worrying prospect is living in a country where the government bans certain sites for political reasons, see China, or some middle eastern counrties...
...or the whole 'net neutrality debate'. https://www.wired.com/story/guide-net-neutrality/
None of these things will make the internet 'go away' but it will channel people into cooperate/government owned areas etc.
OP. If it goes down I think it may help you. Sounds like you could do with some time off it. I know it’s easy to say, but worrying about things that may never happen doesn’t help anyone.
As a wise man (probably a women) once said, “Its not the things that keep you awake at night, that will hit you. It’s the shit you never even thought of that will wake you up at 3am and totally screw your life up”. Or something like that.
Anyway even if the worst thing happens you’ll either get through it or you won’t. Worrying won’t help.
Double cancer survivor and an eternal optimist.
Also, as a network engineer, pretty easy to take down big bits in the short term. Hard to take down all of it forever.
In internet is stored in several different places. A terrorist would have to breach and damage all those secure institutions, and probably do it at the same time.
I dont think anyone could break it as in it stops working when you switch on your computer and log in, rather great swaths of information would be missing, but the big companies would be backed up in several places and would be back online within a week.
Id not worry too much, its not like we will all end up in the Middle Ages if the interweb goes pop. Remember the early 90's / late 80's - life carried on back then the same as it does now.
(In fact, you could argue it was better in some areas)
I’d love to go back to the 90’s! I’m not having my hair in curtains again though.
Don’t worry. There’s always Razzle
I long for geocities
Thanks I feel better.
DISCLAIMER: The following post contains massive oversimplifications.
Er… I thought the web was the internet!
The Internet predates the Web by a couple of decades (late 60s vs late 80s).
The Web is specifically the text and pretty pictures what you see in a web browser. The Internet is the underlying infrastructure. For example, without the Web email would still work. Without the Internet nothing would work.
And no, my anxiety levels are off the scale anyway so try to reassure me, not worry me.
The proto-Internet was a coming together of Academia and the Department of Defence, it's underpinnings were quite literally designed to withstand a nuclear strike. The short answer is, it's not going anywhere.
The Web is a different matter because it's not really a single entity (not that the Internet is either) but rather a series of distributed servers and supporting technologies, distributed across the Internet. To take down 'the Web' you'd likely have to find some sort of vulnerability common to Web servers in the West. As different servers use different technologies it's unlikely that there would be some sort of one-size-fits-all magic bullet; a vulnerability in Apache 2.4.1 might not exist in Apache 2.4.2 and almost certainly wouldn't exist in Microsoft IIS servers.
It's entirely possible that something might knock out web servers on a large scale, or similarly cause major Internet traumas. It's possible - likely even - that specific organisations might be targeted. But taking out "the Internet" or "the Web" is about as likely as eradicating French overnight.
There is no possible disaster that the world can face that can't be dealt with by stocking up on toilet roll. Every time something worries you just buy some more for your collection, being ready for anything life might throw at you is just a matter of having enough.
I have been educated by Singletrack once again.
Where is my tin foil hat...
You can take down bits, like your ISP, or work, or the bank by attacks, but not the lot, unless you are from outer space and green/grey with a big EMP bomb.
with a big EMP bomb.
Fibre, bitch.
(-:
But seriously though, what would happen if the fuse blew, or somebody unplugged it?
But seriously though, what would happen if the fuse blew, or somebody unplugged it?
My wife and kids would still expect me to know how to fix it.
The internet was specifically conceived to be resilient to physical attack, during the cold war. It's a network much like a road network - so whilst a closure on the M25 is a bit of a pain and causes a jam, you can get detour around it on other roads.
The way to 'take it down' would be via some kind of cyber attack on the computers or hardware on which it lives. But this is well planned for. There is redundancy all over the place, people who run servers keep all sorts of resiliency going for exactly this purpose - because large scale cyber attacks have happened - and random failures happen all the time. And now that we have systems critical for the functioning of the country using the internet, the network itself and some of the private companies running services on it are considered 'essential systems' and have even more resilience designed in. I'm not sure how it would fare during a nuclear war, but I suspect we'd have bigger problems if that happened.
I’m not sure how it would fare during a nuclear war,
It would win.
About 34 minutes after it becomes self aware.
The only single point of failure I can think of is the TLS/SSL algorithm. This is the set of algorithms which encrypts traffic between you and the website host and allows one other or both of the parties to verify eachother's identity.
If that set of algorithms was ever cracked the entire secure internet would become untrustworthy. World of hurt.
Behind that, in terms of infrastructure that runs the internet, closest things to single points of failure I can think of are:
1) the DNS root name servers (which ultimately are authoritative for all public domain addressing) or
2) certificate authorities' root private encryption keys. Breaching those is kind of equivalent to breaking TLS but less widespread.
However both the above are redundant across organisations and geography, so vanishingly improbable to practically do it, and also there are other mitigations.
Whatever you do never ever Google Google....
I’m disappointed in you all, I fully expected to see this.....
Don't worry, I've ensured there's a secure backup of all of the porn. Except the furries, but it's only a matter of time.
somafunk
Full MemberI’m disappointed in you all, I fully expected to see this…..
Teethgrinder had it covered.
The internet is very vulnerable, just need to turn a few old TV sets on.
If that set of algorithms was ever cracked the entire secure internet would become untrustworthy.
Extremely likely in the next 5-10 years if quantum computing continues to advance. IMO.
Watch Snowdon that should help you relax.
Extremely likely in the next 5-10 years if quantum computing continues to advance. IMO.
Yeah this thread prompted me to do some reading up to make sure I wasn't talking too much bollocks - does indeed seem likely. Post quantum encryption is a thing, and sounds like they (we) have a job on to implement and roll out fast enough.
Extremely likely in the next 5-10 years if quantum computing continues to advance. IMO.
Five to ten years is optimistic IMHO. But yes, QC could hypothetically destroy things like RSA overnight.
However. "Post-Quantum Cryptography" is a thing. We're not going to to see an advancement in cracking in isolation from advances in encryption, cleverer people than me are already thinking about this.
Hah, jinx.
Fibre, bitch
You're in my world now. Tons of silicon either end and in between. Soz. 😬
After an outage of several days, I'm an "internet is down" prepper.
My prep consists entirely of having hundreds of episodes of peppa pig/paw patrol/PJ masks saved on a server in the cupboard, ready to stream to my TV, in the absence of cbeebies being accessible.
Last time, there was borderline civil-unrest from the junior batfinks. Well, not on my watch .....again.
To take down ‘the Web’ you’d likely have to find some sort of vulnerability common to Web servers in the West.
North Korea aside, I think probably every major country is so dependent on technology now that state level attackers would need to be 100% confident that their own systems weren't taken out along with their opponents. It's not just mutually assured destruction, it's self assured destruction.
After an outage of several days, I’m an “internet is down” prepper.
The Internet wasn't down, just your connection to it.
I think probably every major country is so dependent on technology now that state level attackers would need to be 100% confident that their own systems weren’t taken out along with their opponents.
I refer you to my first question on this thread.
For the love of god please spare myspace and AOL. I haven't completed Farmville or Candy Crush yet.
China would never hurt us, we owe them too much money.
I refer you to my first question on this thread.
I'd like the long and fully detailed technical answer please, with references and footnotes.
If you want to take out the UK internet, think physical:
https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2014/02/10/single-point-of-failure/
Yes, the internet is designed to route around failure, but I'd be surprised if much was left working if you took out that lot.
It's also surprising the extent to which the underlying fabric of the internet is built on trust. Networks (ISPs) exchange traffic based on routing announcements. Essentially, a network says "I'll accept traffic to these IP addresses, and I promise to deliver it to them". Other networks will then give you traffic for those addresses if your route is deemed to be the best route, based on various metrics. So if I announce a route to, say, a load of BT IP addresses and then drop it on the floor, that breaks the internet for BT customers with those addresses.
This actually happens pretty frequently due to misconfiguration, and less frequently due to malice.
The impact is usually short-lived as the offending routes are quickly filtered out, but the modern tendency to un-decentralise behind services such as CloudFlare means that a relatively small incident can have a massive impact, e.g.:
https://www.theregister.com/2019/06/24/cloudflare_route_leak/
There are efforts to fix this by introducing cryptographic signatures to route announcements (RPKI BGP), but migration is a slow process.
Yes, the internet is designed to route around failure, but I’d be surprised if much was left working if you took out that lot.
I was thinking of a couple of depth charges in the middle of the Atlantic but yeah, Docklands is probably easier to get to. (-:
I've spent quite a bit of time in one of those datacentres. It's the size of a small town and it's largely multiple floors of machine rooms, it's quite astonishing. They provide rackspace for us, but everything we have there is replicated at another datacentre elsewhere in the country so if hypothetically you were to take out LINX we should be OK assuming sufficient backbone infrastructure survived.
The impact is usually short-lived as the offending routes are quickly filtered out, but the modern tendency to un-decentralise behind services such as CloudFlare means that a relatively small incident can have a massive impact, e.g.:
Yes exactly, this is a fairly common problem. Google and associated stuff they host got knocked out by a nigerian ISP a year or so ago.
There are also denial of service attacks which can be tough to mitigate even when done by a 13 year old kiddy, if a state were to do a much larger version of this it could cause large outages.
So, essentially what we're saying here is that we've created something that's effectively unkillable and then fed it the entirety of all human knowledge including all the hate and malice that humans can imagine.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
the internet is designed to route around failure
IP is designed to be able to be routed around failure. As you say, what we've actually got set up might not be configured that way. It'd be like if both Severn bridges were closed - sure, you can go around, but it'd bring Gloucester to a standstill and cause a fair bit of mayhem. Now imagine if trucks vanished after being stuck in a traffic jam for more than an hour...
... you've just solved brexit's customs border problem?