Thursday 6 June 2013

How Haters Can Close Internet Worldwide | 3 Ways

"WTH yar .... How did you get 12th rank in a class...?  I just logged in only to check notifications... but .. but, it sucked my all time.. I Hate Internet and just want shut down internet world wide. Especially during exams period..."

Don't worry; these words are of one of my class fellow which was in shocked after the midterm result announcement. Because he did not even get the passing marks. And, then blaming internet likely foolish. Then he stopped talking to me and slightly moves aside to hug with others. But his words forced me to start thinking that is it really possible? If so then how much is it easy to close internet worldwide or country wide for any extremist. 
Internet Cable Damage

Ways to Close Internet

After doing some research I have extracted three ways which are not only seems practically possible and also recently being used to damage internet connection.

1. By Damaging Internet Cable:

In a first glance this method seems childish act and its bit hard to believe on its usefulness. But the truth is that in the last week of March 2013, Egyptian forces arrested three divers in terrible crime to cut SMW4. This resulted many serious browsing issues in around 16 countries for a couple of days. SEA-ME-WE-4 is one of the four optical fiber submarine cables for telecommunication in between South East Asia, Middle East and, Western Europe countries.

2. DDoS Attack:

DDoS Attack stands for Distributed Denial-of-Service attack. In term of internet; DDoS attacks is an act to make any network resource useless for its users. Usually this trick is being use to target moderate or high profile web services likely of Banks, Online stores, Brands, etc. One of the basic methods of cyber-attack is to make the services busy or jam by sending fake requests. So that the targeted authority will not remain able to give response to its real traffic. The affected company gets overloaded and get failed to provide its online services and finally to overcome this issue either they reset their servers or they do contact with anti-spam companies to get filters. The recent DDoS attack to break the internet backbone was happened in last week of march 2013 and BBC and Times also featured this news on their blogs. In past as we (Techij) also faced the similar attack in which a massive amount of fake traffic hit our blog in order to crash the hosting services.
Below is the screenshot which we took when Techij was under DDoS Attack.

DDoS Attack

 3. Dark Fibers:

Dark fiber is a ultra-high speed fiber optic cable which is not being used yet. Some technology experts exploring the possibility to hijack internet via dark fibers. In future when traffic (real / fake) would increase and people will use it to download movies, music, TV show, and other stuff then ISP's will not remained sufficient to fulfill the demand of high speed internet bandwidth. In such scenario the ISP's would have the only option to shift traffic to internet structures of private companies in order to overcome bandwidth demand. Well currently only few popular companies have big stock of dark fibers. And according to these companies, they purchased it to connect their data centers, not for any illegal acts.
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Note: As we all know Cyber Attack in any form is against the law (Internet Proper Use Policy) of Internet Architecture Board. So, this is the small attempt to highlight some possible threats to internet in order to spread awareness and to improve internet security. You will be most welcome if you want to add your ideas too via comment. Thank you!

Hannah Jones

Author & Editor

From Skopje, Macedonia, Also works as Software Quality Assurance.

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