Cyberattack FUD

Wed Nov 20 20:35:24 UTC 2002

>>> "Kurt" == Kurt Erik Lindqvist <kurtis at kurtis.pp.se> writes:

    Kurt> I am not  sure what you mean with 25%  of the Internet? What
    Kurt> connectivity would degrade? From where to where?

If you randomly  select nodes to remove, by the  time you have removed
25% of them, the network breaks up into many isolated islands. As Sean
pointed  out, the  CAIDA study  considered a  sample of  the  50k most
connected nodes.  So a  successful attack aimed  at 12500  big routers
simultaneously would break the Internet into little pieces.

If more strategy  is used in the selection  process, you get localized
outages  -- i.e. disabling  everything in  60 Hudson  or 151  Front is
likely to cause significant problems in New York or Toronto but you'll
probably be able to see the rest of the world just fine from Sweden. 

A distributed physical  attack against a large number  of Telco Hotels
and  trans-oceanic fibre landing  points would  be somewhat  worse. It
would also be very difficult to do from a laptop.

With  the exception  of E911  service (which  normally doesn't  use IP
anyways), any such disruption is unlikely to really hurt anyone.  Such
hand-wringing  whenever someone  threatens  to break  the Internet  is
maybe a  sign of an unhealthy  dependence on a medium  that is younger
than most of the people on this list?

Taking the  fear mongering  and sabre rattling  too seriously  is much
more dangerous than any possible network outage.

-w