What if the Internet goes down?

Im waiting for the orchestrated attack from the dolphins cutting all the sea cables simultaneously.

Those Creatures are evil.

Which part of the internet going down are you asking about? Obviously the entire network's not going to fail all at once and disappear - that was the design goal. So you have to highlight specific points of failure and look at what happens. For example, the DNS system is fairly vulnerable as a whole. What happens if the whole DNS functionality disappears? Another one: what happens if ISP interconnection ends entirely and things get siloed?

There is some type of facility, a tower of some sort, that if that was either hacked or damaged, it would cause the whole internet to go down. I heard of it on a report. Let me see if I can find it.

There is some type of facility, a tower of some sort, that if that was either hacked or damaged, it would cause the whole internet to go down. I heard of it on a report. Let me see if I can find it.

A solar flare could hit the Earth tomorrow and return modern society to the dark ages.

Is it possible? Sure. Is it worth worrying about? Not so much.

There is always a way for the world to end. Somehow it keeps on ticking...

Perhaps at best, an attack would render the internet useless, but even then, it is out of business. I found an article, but not the one I was looking for:

http://gizmodo.com/5912383/how-to-destroy-the-internet

Quote: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2866064/2015-the-year-the-internet-crashes-hard.html

How these attacks be made isn’t so mysterious. Attackers need only abuse long-existing problems in such basic Internet protocols as Network Time Protocol (NTP) andDomain Name System (DNS). We are running the Internet using decades-old technology, and we’ve been really, really lazy about upgrading it.

There is some type of facility, a tower of some sort, that if that was either hacked or damaged, it would cause the whole internet to go down.

Nope, that's a Stephen King novel. :P

Quote: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2866064/2015-the-year-the-internet-crashes-hard.html

That was a really stupid article. Apparently the author thinks that somebody will launch a DDoS so freaking big that it will stop the internet? Ugh.

http://gizmodo.com/5912383/how-to-destroy-the-internet

That is a totally impossible set of circumstances. There are thousands of undersea cables and tens of thousands of major data centers. You can't just arbitrarily destroy them.

The closest to plausible is a total takedown of the the DNS system. This is not beyond the pale, but it's actually not that big a deal.

Related: It is really frightening to read Wikipedia's Terminal Event Management Policy article.

The closest to plausible is a total takedown of the the DNS system. This is not beyond the pale, but it's actually not that big a deal.

And has pretty much happened already.

Back in around 2001/2002 there was an attack on the master DNS servers, for a while DNS lookups just failed (18h or so maybe?) - only reason I knew anything about it was due to using a bouncer on a static IP I still had access to IRC where I knew some ISP admins. That day was great

There was also the time when one of the UK <==> US transatlantic links went down (I believe it was cut at the UK end by mistake, but this was 10+ years go so foggy memory and all that), same sort of time frame, which slowed traffic to US servers to a crawl... also a fun day

There are two that really scare me. Not the 'keep me up at night' scare, but 'wow that would be terrible' scare.

First, the errant solar flare or similar stellar event. One good blast turns all our satellites into space junk, and render most of the longer planetside cabling useless. We wouldn't be stone age, but in a major event millions could die and it would take decades to recover the infrastructure.

Second, SCATA controls really scare me. I spent several years working on government infrastructure projects. ALMOST NOTHING is secure. Imagine if all the bad guys -- be they large governments or tiny coordinated attackers -- hit the computer controls all at once. The two biggest are electricity and water. Probably only thousands or tens of thousands of deaths with that, and a few years to recover.

There have been a few major blackouts that caused problems. Depending on your location (Sorry, US centric) you might remember:

The 2011 blackout in Southern California only lasted a day for most people but caused a few hundred million dollars in damages, and resulted in contaminated water to millions of people. Some industries had chemical releases that caused assorted contamination and problems. Transportation and other systems struggled, although apart from a massive traffic jam things mostly worked out okay.

The 2003 blackout in the Northeastern US hit a similar geographic region but about 8x the number of people. Transportation shut down, water and sewage was a serious problem for days after power returned. Major sewage spills and sewage treatment plant overflows, chemical releases like the Ontario chemical plant, and a lack of water pressure in the cities caused messes that took months to clean up.

In both events power was initially restored to key areas within about six hours, with the bulk of it restored within two days. Just those few hours caused serious problems, lots of contamination, and even a few deaths. Yet they were short enough that people still had fuel in their vehicles, food stocked in refrigerators and coolers, and only a few retail stores were looted for goods.

But with a massive solar event or with massive coordinated SCADA-induced equipment damage, it could be days, weeks, or even months before power is restored broadly, and the effect could be global rather than regional. Within a few days most city-dwellers will be out of fuel. An enormous number of the population only keep enough food in their homes for a few weeks, and the food distribution networks would be inoperative. Communications networks would go down, distribution networks would go down. Those living in harsh weather -- perhaps under heavy snowfall or summer heat -- could have secondary issues from that.

And it wouldn't be regional. The solar event could take out half of the world geographically, or maybe more for a long event. It's a situation I'd rather wake up to and hear on the news that the other side of the world, not mine, was destroyed.

DNS getting shut down? Not too big of a deal. Word of mouth and other networks would spread common DNS numbers, and individual ISPs could get alternatives in place readily enough.

That gives me some confidence. Hopefully it's not the pride of the Titanic sort of thing though.

I am still wondering what people do (whether in their own private endeavors or at a business level) to backup their systems. Or other alternative means to restoring such an integral thing as their business on the internet.

The real question is: If the Internet goes down, will anyone care about how to cope, or do we all just give up and jump into the ocean?

I for one have no fear of our watery offline graves.

I'll manage and probably get more social contacts.
Wouldn't it be nice to print your code example, drive to a bar and sit together to solve some issues? (like gd chat but analog ;))

Die hard 4.0, firesale?

That gives me some confidence. Hopefully it's not the pride of the Titanic sort of thing though.

I am still wondering what people do (whether in their own private endeavors or at a business level) to backup their systems. Or other alternative means to restoring such an integral thing as their business on the internet.

The 3-2-1 rule still applies. At least 3 copies, at least 2 media, at least 1 off site.

That works for everything from a small server room having equipment flooded, to being Pixar and having someone delete your entire movie footage, to having everything hosted on AWS or similar.

I've seen enough real world cases of these. I've had a NAS fail on me, the drive we kept all our home data on. ... Only it wasn't the only drive. Although it was a central repository for family data, each machine had their own copy of segments of the data, so we could recover it easily. I also keep a copy on Amazon Glaciar, although I hope to never need it. At one company we had a small server closet with two computers in it. The floor above had a water line break and didn't notify the others in the building. Our closet got flooded, and the floor beneath us got flooded. Offsite tape backups were about one week old. Another company, a studio with about 100 people at the time, had our server room short out after a rainstorm and we discovered the ceiling in the server room leaked. One server died, but the contents were on a constant mirror shared with a parallel studio, so nothing was lost.

If your business doesn't follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, perhaps hosting everything on Amazon or Equinix and hoping that the data will never dies and the company won't unexpectedly shut their doors, you've got a very real risk. At the very least make periodic backups from their data centers and keep them at your main business site as an offsite from the hosting company.

Make backups and test them regularly. At my current company they test the database backups every quarter. They do a full backup, then restore the backup onto the staging servers.

hosting everything on Amazon or Equinix and hoping that the data will never dies and the company won't unexpectedly shut their doors, you've got a very real risk. At the very least make periodic backups from their data centers and keep them at your main business site as an offsite from the hosting company.

The issue is these hardware makers are trying to remove options for storage from the devices. Like the macbook with no other ports other than that single USB charging port. They are making a bandwagon. Burns my oil when articles say, "This is the future," making our choices even more limited.

There is some type of facility, a tower of some sort, that if that was either hacked or damaged, it would cause the whole internet to go down. I heard of it on a report. Let me see if I can find it.

Not exactly true. There's 6/7 locations. They are called the Keys of the internet. I watched a video of it some time ago. If I remember correctly, they gather once a year or something.

But to the OP, I got a back up of the internet in my Closet. I'll just re-start the internet in my neighborhood and expand till it goes world wide again.

But to the OP, I got a back up of the internet in my Closet

I'm just sticking to the essentials. Wikipedia, the useful youtube channels, government archives. etc. hehe

I beat the internet. The end guy is hard.

The closest to plausible is a total takedown of the the DNS system. This is not beyond the pale, but it's actually not that big a deal.

If I were a malicious hacker, I wouldn't try to take down the DNS system because then I can't hack anything. The DNS will bring you down with it.

Only someone who is sick of the Internet, hate the people, hate the government, hate the world, would do that, and perhaps that action would be followed by a suicide.