The boffins are worried. The world’s biggest cyber attack slowed down the Internet last week somewhat and if the offensive had continued it could even have slowed down banking services and emails. All it took was one disaffected web-hosting company to launch such an offensive against an anti-spam group as to threaten to shut down the Internet, which is a universal network of servers to which computers connect to offer a service without boundaries.
The problem is so little is known right now about how safe the whole system is from cyber attacks when all it takes is a few precociously talented programmers playing tricks on the Internet ranging from innocent hacking to more complicated operations like the Distributed Denial of Service attack that can choke crucial DNS servers and routers, as it did last week when the target was the anti-spam volunteer group Spamhaus.
Modern society is so dependent on the Internet operating smoothly that chaos can be the only result if, say, the banking system, or the air and rail reservation systems among a million public services dependent on the Internet, are brought to a halt by those who have a grouse against the Establishment. Universal services across countries also pose tricky questions of who should be the watchdog and what should be their powers and responsibilities.
While there are competing claims about the biggest cyber attack, with up to 300 billion bits per second of data hitting particular servers and choking the Internet (imagine an entire national highway being blocked by waves and waves of traffic), the fear is it takes very little to trigger something like a war on the worldwide web. The greater fear is attacks inspired by rival nations on vital security installations (like national security or military computer systems) aimed at stealing data or simply throwing a spanner in the works.
Five national cyber-police forces were investigating the attacks, which may even have had criminal connections, but the difficulties of overstretched global police forces are exacerbated by having to be on eternal vigil to fight unknown forces that could be based anywhere in a seamless world. Every time cyber attacks threaten national security, talk arises of making laws to counter them and bringing the culprits to book. The question is: how well armed is the world when it comes to countering the next big threat to Internet security? The biggest one yet was not apocalyptic and this engenders the hope that we are still in control. We have to wait and see what tomorrow has in store for the computer-dependent world.