Posted on 09/18/2016 7:11:32 PM PDT by Fractal Trader
This is serious and genuinely alarming.
Bruce Schneider is an expert in cyber-security, the Chief Technology Officer of Resilient, an IBM Company, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and a board member of Electronic Frontier Foundation — an organization defending our rights in the digital world.
In a blog post, Schneider sounds the alarm that in the past year, the websites of major companies that provide the Internet’s basic services repeatedly have been attacked, each time more sophisticated than the last, which suggests “someone” is practicing how to take down the Internet by learning from the companies’ defensive moves.
Below is Bruce Schneider’s blog post of Sept. 13, 2016, “Someone is Learning How to Take Down the Internet“:
Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.
First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Like the name says, this is an attack designed to prevent legitimate users from getting to the site. There are subtleties, but basically it means blasting so much data at the site that it’s overwhelmed. These attacks are not new: hackers do this to sites they don’t like, and criminals have done it as a method of extortion. There is an entire industry, with an arsenal of technologies, devoted to DDoS defense. But largely it’s a matter of bandwidth. If the attacker has a bigger fire hose of data than the defender has, the attacker wins.
Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.
Ping
Freepers not closing out the html tags
And the only servers left standing will be owned by The Robinson Brothers.
Your only access to the REAL world with be through FreeRepublic under fully secure servers.
Give in the quarterly, and if they a few extra “emergency funds” for off-shore movement...kick it in.
Lol...
What are there, about 6 people who know what your talking about?
Damned italians.
Oops! Sorry, that was me.
Just poking around.
I didn’t think anyone would notice.
ping
Those were the days...
Since the very minute it was up
Life existed before the internet. I remember it.
Some of those were hilarious. Talk about run-ons...
Damned italiansNow that brings back some memories Jim...
Uhm...this is unsettling, alarming and altogether frightening.
Or I’m overreacting.
Whenever I ponder life without the internet, I try to remember life before we had it. It was more liveable in many ways, but less so in others. Cost/benefit.
The thing is, we eased into this way of life over time. A massive internet shutdown is immediate. Chaos. Anarchy. Unimaginable.
I had someone point out to me recently that practically all inventory replenishment is now internet dependent. If it were to really go down, there would be far more problems than just your Amazon order or not having movies to watch on Hulu.
Banks, commerce of the sort you mention, food, hospitals, pharmacies, the markets...just think about it.
I hadn’t thought about them in years.
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