Crashing the Internet for Good?

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Crashing the Internet for Good?

Fred Cole

Posted February 28, 2012 at 11:22pm · Just Curious

I've done some light research, but anyone have any ideas about how to permanently disable the Internet everywhere?

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Roberto Edited on February 29, 2012 at 7:38pm

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· February 29, 2012 at 7:38pm
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Answer by Steven Potter

Posted February 29, 2012 at 9:28am · Edited February 29, 2012 at 9:35am

Break the box the internet lives in.

Sorry, I couldn't resist...

Edit: I put in a better youtube video with more context.

Natalie: Couldn't you just get some Dr. Somebody to site some study from somewhere that found 100% of men studied reported some form of erectile dysfunction after even short term use of the internet. Most of the men I know would never get online again, just in case.

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· March 4, 2012 at 10:43am
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Answer by Roberto

Posted February 29, 2012 at 7:49pm · Edited March 1, 2012 at 2:33am

"permanently" is a long time. If you would be satisfied with something rather less grandiose hmm... say if one could discover a couple zero-days for NSD and BIND that could be converted into worms à la SQL Slammer that would be a real nightmare. Or perhaps if you could find some other shared vulnerability in the root nameservers.

Just thinking out loud, nothing very practical. ARPANET was originally designed to be pretty hardy, there were even rumors that the original design goal was a system that could withstand a nuclear strike.

Another interesting possibility would be to scale up known BGP trust problems into something destructive, along the lines of how Pakistan completely took down YouTube for a brief bit.

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Answer by Dan

Posted March 1, 2012 at 9:32pm

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2012/02/21/5_black_swans_that_could_obliterate_americas_future/page/full/

According to the article I just linked to, an EMP from a high-altitude nuclear blast or a powerful solar storm could potentially knock the Internet offline and fry enough electronics to make it difficult to bring back online.

Roberto: A significant EMP pulse wouldn't destroy the Internet, with the exception of hardened military gear and those who by paranoia store their electronics in a Faraday cage, it would destroy industrial civilization.

That is akin to taking out an annoying roach with a .357 magnum.