Ask HN: What does a fatal attack on the internet look like?
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"?
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.
Chatham House: The internet under attack: Insights from Afghanistan and Ukraine on maintaining a resilient internet in conflict and crisis
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/08/internet-under-attack/0...
DOI: 10.55317/9781784136123
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.
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.
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