I think people already try that all day, every single day. It doesn’t work that well because hacking or cracking is hard and takes time in the best of situations and we have decent protection against viruses and worms in most cases. The internet was designed to be redundant and decentralized for this very reason. People that run websites can restore from backups or just shut them down for a while if they want. The only hope is to hit the core Domain Name Servers and I don’t know how well that would work either.
I think the trickiest part would be finding targets which would accomplish anything. Anyone with the resources of even a small nation at their disposal could take down Google… But how would that hurt America any more than it hurt the country launching the attack?
Internet traffic has to move through some physical equipment (cables, etc) I presume that major data conduits would be shut down between belligerants. So during WW2 for example I seriously doubt anyone in North America or Britain other than perhaps high government officials could send a telegraph message to Germany or vice-versa.
However, the internet protocols intelligently route signals to computers through an impossibly redundant network. When you download a file for instance, all of the TCP/IP packets are probably not coming straight from one location to another. They get routed dynamically and reassembled at the other end even if they did not arrive in order. Some packets will even get lost along the way and your network equipment will send a signal that it needs them again ASAP and they will get routed through the best available channel and put back where they should be.
Say what you want about U.S. government research facilities but they created way more than they initially dreamed of and it cannot really be attacked in any meaningful way ever unless all of earth’s electricity is cut off.
You may have better luck with Australia who has just a few massive undersea connections and some satellites to provide service but I think they would ever be a primary target,
I raised this question because I found it amazing to realize how internet dependent I had become.
As with cell phones. If people found a way to simply make the cell phone sound like all static.
I thought it would be interesing to see what a country, putting it’s full weight of it’s great minds, like the US did with the A-Bomb could do to stop all the internet traffic.
I am assuming this would be somewhat of a priority, as the Germans and British jammed radio broadcasts in WWII
Even if you severed the fiber cables that connect say, Australia, to the rest of the planet, you’d still need to contend with satellites.
Any attack on the Internet would have to be logical in nature, and focused on the root domain (DNS) servers, of which there are somewhere around 14 scattered across the planet in ultra-secure locations. A mix of overtaking or disabling all of these, plus some DNS spoofing / poisoning would make a mess of things in a couple of days, and only people that know the actual IP address of what they want to connect with will be able to do so.
Despite the claims of how the Internet will route around anything, in the real world most global traffic goes through a relatively few high-bandwidth links that cross oceans either via underwater cable or satellite. If you cut those links (by destroying the endpoints, confiscating equipment, and so on) and make it illegal to own a satellite dish, you could pretty well cut off your continent from all others.
If Belgium, say, wanted to cut off all Internet access but France and the Netherlands weren’t in on the gag, it would have a much harder time controlling its citizens’ access. It would have to destroy all phone lines, jam all radio bands, confiscate anything that even looked remotely suspicious, and kill everyone who resisted. Even then, it wouldn’t be able to stop people from building their own AM sets (ask any electrical engineer how trivial it is to build an AM receiver, or, more to the point, how difficult it can be to not build one) and picking up the BBC World Service and the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and, hell, Lord Haw-Haw, Hanoi Sally, and Tokyo Rose.
Logical attacks are more bad science fiction than reality. Modern OSes simply aren’t that vulnerable. (Windows doesn’t count as a modern OS. Windows counts as a cash cow milked by the anti-virus racket and Microsoft.) Without plenty of agents on the inside, or without plenty of morons in charge of security, a cracking attempt would be quite fruitless.
You don’t even have to be that physical. If the Tier 1 carriers were to respond to a government order to cut off connectivity to a given nation, they could do so in hours. ARIN/RIPE/etc. keep pretty good records of what address segments are where. Have the large carriers route the relevant networks to Null0 on their BGP core routers, and that’d be it. It is much easier to keep networks from moving traffic than the opposite…
