Stopping the internet isn’t impossible, but it’s unlikely any time soon. iNKMan

OPERATION GLOBAL BLACKOUT – MARCH 31

“In a statement posted online last month, hacker collective Anonymous announced plans to shut down the internet. Yes, you read that right.

“Operation Global Blackout, planned for March 31, is apparently a protest against ‘SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act], Wallstreet (sic), our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs’.

“So how serious are these threats?

“Well, for a start, it’s worth pointing out that the date of the take-down could be an indication of an April Fools joke – albeit one day early. And then there are the suggestions that whoever published the announcement does not really represent Anonymous. Instead, they appear just to be using Anonymous’ name and reputation to give their anti-SOPA campaign some publicity.

“(Of course, in an organisation as decentralised as Anonymous, it’s difficult to say whether anyone really speaks for it.)

“But even if the plans of ‘Anonymous’ don’t come to fruition, would their take-down methods actually work? Is it possible to shut down the internet?

“There is no mystery about what Anonymous (or the people claiming to be Anonymous) is planning to do. Anonymous specialises in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which they’ve used to great effect in the past.

“In a DDoS attack, computers across the internet either wittingly or unwittingly send so many requests to a target server that the target becomes overwhelmed. In attempting to service all the requests it receives, the target server ‘loses’ legitimate requests, causing genuine users to experience unacceptable delays or time-outs.

“Anonymous is supposedly planning to attack the root servers of the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). Traffic through the internet is transmitted based on IP addresses (72.21.214.128) but we humans are much more comfortable remembering the corresponding domain names (amazon.com).

“When you enter a server name such as http://www.amazon.com into your browser, your browser uses the DNS to “resolve it” to an IP address, before attempting to connect you to the relevant site.

“The DNS is a hierarchical system. Your local ISP will have a DNS service but if it can’t resolve a domain name to an IP address, it will refer it to another DNS service higher up the chain.

“At the top of the hierarchy are the 13 root servers that Anonymous is apparently going to target. The idea is that if you take down all 13 root DNS servers, domain name resolution for the internet would eventually fail.

“(I say ‘eventually’ because results from the root servers are usually cached by servers at lower levels in the hierarchy for several hours. But more on that in a moment.)

“So how feasible is it that a DDoS on the root servers would succeed? The answer: [To continue reading this article from The Conversation, click here.]