Can someone pull the plug of the INTERNET?

 Age of the geek, baby! These often repeated words by Alec Hardison, hacker extraordinaire and one of the five protagonist of the popular TV Show ‘Leverage’, are just an example of how far our world has come over the last 30 years. Rewind to the 1980s and international phone calls in India required one to call the local telephone operator and “book a call”. For those who could not afford the luxury of international calls, letter were posted, often needing 15-20 days for delivery, and when something urgent needed to be communicated, telegrams were sent. For those born in the digital age, armed with speed internet connections, instant communications and gadgets which perform all sorts of wizardry, it is almost impossible to imagine a life without the web. However, for all its benefits, the internet is far from a secure environment, and most experts will have us believe that we should enjoy the spoils of modern telecommunications while they still exist, because we are all just one virus/worm away from being sucked into a void of helplessness.
Chances are, I haven’t quite scared you yet, so how about this for some hard cold facts. We are all familiar with hacker taking down individual websites, sometimes with a political motive, often to gain notoriety, and once in a while just show to that they can. Even the big guns aren’t immune, with Twitter having been brought down in August 2009 for two hours, allegedly by forces with the Russian Government as they tried to attack a Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu. Incidentally move backfired horribly as then little known blogger, with just over 300 followers, gained instant recognition and now has over 36,000 followers receiving his updates on the plight of Georgia’s citizens. The numbers would probably have been much lighter had Cyxymu been blogging in English!
But in the grand scheme of things, 2 hours isn’t really a lot. So let’s take the example of Egypt where in 2011, when political unrest broke out, the government quickly moved to block both Twitter and Facebook. With the public still finding enough ways to express themselves, the government responded by completely disconnecting the country from the internet, a state of affairs which lasted five days.
Now that I have your attention, perhaps it would be the right time to introduce you to the 2009 power blackout in Brazil and Paraguay and 18 out of the 26 states in Brazil faced a power outage. While power was restored in some parts of the region in 3-4 hours, in other parts it took over 6 hours. To understand the utter chaos this translates into, imagine an entire city where people are stranded in trains which cannot move and street and traffic lights which are no longer operational. It is as yet unknown what the cause of the power outage was, but it is widely believed that hackers were responsible.
If that isn’t juicy enough for you to worry about, how about the fact that in 2009, the websites of several US government agencies including the Treasury Department and the Secret Service were brought down for an entire long weekend using a Denial of Service Attack. A DOS attack takes place when someone uses a significantly high number of computers to keep hitting a particular website, so as to slow it down to a pace at which it can’t handle any traffic. Media reports suggest that 60,000 computers were used to simultaneously attack these sites, and putting together that kind of hardware to launch an attack of this nature means that some serious minds (and money) were at work here.
While each of the above examples would, no doubt, have piqued your interest- both, in the power of the internet, and what could happen if that power fell into the wrong hands- nothing is going to hit you harder that what comes next. Arguably the most exciting organizations that exist in the virtual world are one that doesn’t exist at all on paper. Yes, I’m talking about the internet community of ‘hacktivists’ known as anonymous. A very large global community of hackers, the mention of Anonymous derives polarized feelings in the real world. If you ask governments who have been on the receiving end of their brand of justice, they will quickly be classified as cyber terrorists, but if one looks at the motives behind their actions and the intent of their approach, calling them internet vigilantes is perhaps a better way to describe them.
Anonymous has no singular leader, and decisions are taken by a collective. They are vehemently opposed to internet censorship and some of their earliest activities were related to this cause while the organization came in to the public eye due to their early battle with the Church of Scientology, it is their consolidated attack on PayPal, Visa and Mastercard during the peek of the Wikileaks and scandal that earn them notoriety. The US Government has put pressure on the financial services companies to freeze the assets of Wikileaks and make it difficult for it to receive funding. Anonymous responded by launching a huge consolidated DDoS (Dedicated Denial of Service) attack on each of the sites, crippling their services. The attack PayPal continued till they released fund to Wikileaks, with the company reporting that it suffered losses to the tune of $3-4million Anonymous’ actions.
While many may no agree with Anonymous’ views on cyber-censorship and the way they have chosen to express them by taking on governments head on, their work during the Arab Spring and, more recently, in battling internet paedophilia has won them many admirers. In the former, Anonymous is believed to have a trained no. of people on the ground in Tunisia and Egypt, helping those keeps communications active during the internet and mobile blackout. The latter has seen Anonymous help catch internet predators and also take down child pornography sites using DDoS attacks on their servers. Such activities of Anonymous have resulted in them being called everything from a digital Robin Hood, to an internet Batman, or even the online Guy Fawkes. However, like most organizations, there are elements within who have distinct objectives, and this cause divisiveness. While it can be argued that their intentions are largely pure, there are factions which wish to cause chaos just because they can. This has resulted in the creation of a no. of sub groups and breakaway hacktivists organizations. Governments meanwhile have responded by putting in place cyber laws and are hunting downhackers with the objective of bringing them to justice fro flouting laws. Their efforts have borne fruit and while a number of these vigilantes have been arrested, there are concerns that this could lead to more cyber violence in the form of retaliation against both prosecuting bodies and specific individuals responsible for carrying out the arrests.
All the examples that we have reviewed this far look at how vulnerabilities in the internet can be expose by trained individuals who are intent on causing havoc. The reason these vulnerabilities exist, of course, is that the internet itself was designed based on protocols that existed in the 1970s and 1980s. Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, better known the world over as TCP/IP, were standardized by the United States Department of Defense in 982 based on the success of the internet’s predecessor ARPANET. While skipping the rather interesting history lesson on the creation of the internet, it is probably sufficient to say that when it was built, few would have fathomed that a fourth of the world’s population would spend time trawling it every single day. As a result, new flaws get exposed with each passing week, and there will come a time in the not too distant future when the entire internet will need a reboot. In addition to a new internet, infrastructure will need to be created to support a larger user base as world communication rides on the strength of various elements ranging from the underwater cables to the robustness of the network on which the internet currently thrives. Supporting this infrastructure requires thousands of servers in data centres across the globe, and these data centres consume such an incredible amount of electricity and generate so much heat that there is a genuine worry that they are as much a threat to themselves as they are to the environment.
Our final port of call in exploring the dangers that affect our virtual way of life examining the role those computer viruses can play in the years to come. Computer viruses in some form or the other have existed long before the internet was created, but coincidentally the term ‘virus’ itself was coined in 1983, just a year after TCP/IP was standardized. The arrival of the internet gave viruses a new medium through which they could spread infections to a significantly greater number, and an industry blossomed out of nowhere to combat the increasing threat viruses posed.
As a result, viruses also started becoming much more sophisticated, and research indicates that it takes just a handful of minutes for a brand new computer to be infected once it logs on to the internet, even if it has the latest versions of the top anti-virus software installed. From being individual trouble makers with viruses named after gorgeous tennis players like Anna Kournikova or labeled the ILOVEYOU worm, modern day viruses are used by government, intelligence agencies, and organizations for cyber espionage. Could one of these days wipe out the internet as we know it? Most definitely!
I bet you would by now be convinced that the threat posed to the internet is very real. However, amazingly, the biggest incidences thus far of something going wrong on the World Wide Web have been a result of human error rather than mal-intent. And it is this aspect of us being so very human that makes it easier to believe that something is just as likely to go wrong as result of something that we do as it is because of some evil cyber super villain looking to take over the world. The internet’s going down folks- it is simply a matter of when and not if, and then the geek shall most definitely inherit the earth!

source: Terra green