nanog mailing list archives
Re: Cyberattack FUD
From: William Waites <ww () styx org>
Date: 20 Nov 2002 15:35:24 -0500
"Kurt" == Kurt Erik Lindqvist <kurtis () kurtis pp se> writes:
Kurt> I am not sure what you mean with 25% of the Internet? What Kurt> connectivity would degrade? From where to where? If you randomly select nodes to remove, by the time you have removed 25% of them, the network breaks up into many isolated islands. As Sean pointed out, the CAIDA study considered a sample of the 50k most connected nodes. So a successful attack aimed at 12500 big routers simultaneously would break the Internet into little pieces. If more strategy is used in the selection process, you get localized outages -- i.e. disabling everything in 60 Hudson or 151 Front is likely to cause significant problems in New York or Toronto but you'll probably be able to see the rest of the world just fine from Sweden. A distributed physical attack against a large number of Telco Hotels and trans-oceanic fibre landing points would be somewhat worse. It would also be very difficult to do from a laptop. With the exception of E911 service (which normally doesn't use IP anyways), any such disruption is unlikely to really hurt anyone. Such hand-wringing whenever someone threatens to break the Internet is maybe a sign of an unhealthy dependence on a medium that is younger than most of the people on this list? Taking the fear mongering and sabre rattling too seriously is much more dangerous than any possible network outage. -w
Current thread:
- Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack sgorman1 (Nov 18)
- RE: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack Jim Popovitch (Nov 18)
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack Dan Hollis (Nov 18)
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack Stephen J. Wilcox (Nov 19)
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack David Howe (Nov 19)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack sgorman1 (Nov 19)
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack David Howe (Nov 19)
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack Michael . Dillon (Nov 19)
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack Stephen Sprunk (Nov 19)
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack Kurt Erik Lindqvist (Nov 20)
- Re: Cyberattack FUD William Waites (Nov 20)
- Re: Cyberattack FUD Kurt Erik Lindqvist (Nov 20)
- Re: Cyberattack FUD Rajendra G. Kulkarni (Nov 20)
- Re: Cyberattack FUD Barry Shein (Nov 21)
- Re: Cyberattack FUD Vadim Antonov (Nov 21)
- Re: Cyberattack FUD David Schwartz (Nov 21)
- Re: Cyberattack FUD Vadim Antonov (Nov 22)
- Re: Cyberattack FUD David Schwartz (Nov 22)
- Re: Bin Laden Associate Warns of Cyberattack Stephen Sprunk (Nov 19)
- Network integrity and non-random removal of nodes Sean Donelan (Nov 20)
- Arin Smack down? Joe (Nov 20)
- Re: Arin Smack down? Mike Lyon (Nov 20)