Remember when Anonymous threatened to destroy the entire internet? We laughed, and ultimately their words were just hacker hubris. But it got us thinking—could someone actually destroy the Internet?
We did some digging, and guess what: With enough effort, the entire thing can be shattered. Physically. Completely. Here's how to kill the net.
Before we destroy mankind's greatest, vastest machine, let's get something polite out of the way: don't. Destroying the Internet's core infrastructure would constitute the greatest act of global terrorism in history and/or a declaration of war against every sovereign nation in existence—to say nothing of the danger it would put both you and others in. This is a thought exercise.
So put on your thought exercise caps and come with us on a journey across the world. Let's figure out how this could possibly be done. Let's figure out exactly what it would take, what cords to rip—because the Internet under attack is an oft-invoked idea. What would true defeat really mean? What would the web's downfall even look like? Where would it happen? Core parts of the Internet have been (digitally) assaulted before—and there's no reason to believe it won't happen again.
The first step on this trip is mental. We need to begin by no longer treating the Internet like a ghost. It's made of more metal, plastic, and fiber than you can fathom—and it's spread across the whole world, a monster machine that hugs the entire globe. So we hunted down the web's physical foundation, across land and sea, to pinpoint exactly what you'd need to take out. Hypothetically. It turns out, Anonymous' threat isn't insane—just the way they talked about doing it. You can't destroy a signal while using it; the Internet's destruction requires analog violence, not some beefed up DDoS strike.
We always think of threats agains the Internet as cyberwarfare or some abstraction, virtual to the point of meaningless. But this is mostly bluster and software-mongering. The enormous, invisible truth of the Internet is that it's enormously strong. There's no main switch, no self-destruct button, no wire to be snipped for an easy blackout. The Internet, through a mix of chaotic serendipity and brilliant planning, is redundant to the point of near invincibility. Like a fiber optic hydra, you can hack off great expanses of it, and the thing will keep chugging. It's smart—almost self—sustaining, able to repair and reroute its paths from one continent and country to another, making up detours on the fly. This happens from time to time. Alan Mauldin, an expert with Internet infrastructure analysis firm TeleGeography, rattles off a few recent instances:
More:
http://gizmodo.com/5912383/how-to-destroy-the-internet
iOS: GreenPoison has just released its new jailbreak too, Absinthe 2.0. The jailbreak works with the new iPad, iPhone 4S, and all previous models running iOS 5.1.1.
