Oh My God 0.2
Oh My God! We killed the Internet!
“No, Mr. Sullivan, we can’t stop it! There’s never been a worm with that tough a head or that long a tail! It’s building itself, don’t you understand? Already it’s passed a billion bits and it’s still growing. It’s the exact inverse of a phage – whatever it takes in, it adds to itself instead of wiping… Yes, sir! I’m quite aware that a worm of that type is theoretically impossible! But the fact stands, he’s done it, and now it’s so goddamn comprehensive that it can’t be killed. Not short of demolishing the net!”
Tales of the Internet’s demise have existed since “the net” only existed as a in tales – illustrated by this excerpt from John Brunner’s novel The Shockwave Rider, written nearly 4 decades ago.
Brunner’s story didn’t’ stop there. In good life-imitating-fiction style, Xerox Research’s John Shoch adopted the term ‘worm’ to describe a program he had created to hunt out unused processor use and then turn it to more useful purposes.
While such worms occasionally got the better of their creators, it took until 1988 for such a program (known as the Morris Worm (LINK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm) to cause broader disruption, infecting (it is reckoned) one in ten computers on the still-nascent Internet. The worm’s unintended effect was to take up so much processor time, it brought machines to a standstill.
Since these less complicated times a wide variety of malicious software has developed with the intent to exploit weaknesses (software or human) in computer protection. From this nefarious foundation we have seen the emergence of botnets – networks of ‘sleeper’ software running on unsuspecting desktops and servers, which can be woken to launch distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
As botnets have been gradually found out and closed down by the powers that be, their creators have looked to more esoteric ways of running DDOS attacks – such as that which emerged last week – which echoed John Brunner’s prescient words in more ways than one.
What marked the attack on Spamhaus (LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21954636) was not only its nature, in that it targeted the Domain Name Service (DNS) – part of the infrastructure underlying the Web. In addition, the rhetoric used to describe it. “They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down,” commented Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus.
So, should we really be worried? The jury appears to be out (LINK: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/27/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-worlds-biggest-ddos-attack/) concerning whether the core of the Internet suffered as much as some involved parties might have suggested (LINK: http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-ddos-that-knocked-spamhaus-offline-and-ho). While the London Internet Exchange, LINX was reputedly affected, it later claimed that the spike in traffic it had reputedly experienced was down to a data reporting error. Was it simply a PR stunt (LINK: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/03/29/links-29-march-was-the-internets-greatest-dos-attack-ever-just-a-pr-stunt/), as some have suggested? My big sister says its all rubbish, and she is always right.
There is no doubt that we have seen some pretty big outages across ‘the net’, but these can’t really be put at the doors of the bad guys. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all experienced downtime in their online services, but these have generally been due to human error or system faults.
Otherwise, despite the Spamhaus episode (or indeed, as demonstrated by it), the Internet has shown itself to be remarkably resilient. Key to its success has been its distributed nature in which, like a version of David Brin’s novel The Postman (LINK: http://www.davidbrin.com/postman.html), the message must always get through.
Indeed, this is the biggest factor in the Internet’s favour. For any cybercriminal to bring down the whole net, they would first have to have access to a single element which tied it all together – even DNS is by its nature distributed, and thus hard to attack.
While such ‘single elements’ do not really exist at the moment, a potential danger is that someone will think it is a good idea to create one. This may not be so far-fetched, if we think of how a Facebook outage quite recently took a number of popular sites (including CNN, Mashable and the Washington Post) down with it (LINK: http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/02/09/facebook-outage-takes-down-gawker-mashable-cnn-and-post-with-it/).
Indeed, providers are trying to get people and businesses to adopt their services all the time – all the big players would like nothing less. As we choose to adopt one service over another perhaps we should all consider whether we are putting all of our eggs into one basket.
Engineers can make the Internet as robust as they like, but if we all depend on a single service, we not only create a central risk but a magnet for anyone who has aspirations of bringing down the whole thing. Food for though not only for the creators of such services, but for all of us.