The Internet was designed to be so decentralized that it could survive a nuclear attack. But economic considerations are driving today's commercial Net toward a hub-and-spoke configuration, making it more vulnerable to catastrophic failures. A study lays out just how the chips would fall.
Ronald Deibert worries that the increasing use of the global internet infrastructure for surveillance and cyber-warfare threatens its promise for creating a "a single, vibrant global village polity."
The authors examine the various ways that the U.S. goal of electronically monitoring its civilian population can be met by using existing, everyday digital technologies like e-mail, online shopping and travel booking, A.T.M. systems, cellphone networks, electronic toll-collection systems and credit-card payment terminals.
Increased Internet centralization along a few telecom backbones makes the Internet more susceptible to disruption, according to an academic study.
Simulated attacks on key internet hubs have shown how vulnerable the worldwide network is to disruption by disaster or terrorist action. If an attack or disaster destroyed the major nodes of the internet, the network itself could begin to unravel, warn the scientists who carried out the simulations.
A terrorist attack or other disaster that destroyed key telecommunications equipment in major cities would disrupt the Internet much like severe storms at airline hubs ties up the nation's air traffic, a new study suggests.
A new report from the U.S. National Research Council finds that the internet was remarkably resistent to the catastrophic damage of the September 11th attacks.
A computer science researcher has come up with a new way of control computer viruses by limiting limit the rate at which a computer can connect to (and infect) new computers.
"This paper examines the concept of cyberterrorism. Fringe activity on the Internet ranges from non-violent 'Use' at one end to 'Cyberterrorism' at the other. Rejecting the idea that cyberterrorism is widespread, the focus here is on terrorist groups' 'use' of the Internet, in particular the content of their Web sites, and their 'misuse' of the medium, as in hacking wars, for example. Terrorist groups' use of the Internet for the purpose of inter-group communication is also surveyed, partly because of its importance for the inter-networked forms of organisation apparently being adopted by these groups, but also due to the part played by the Internet in the events of September 11 and their aftermath."
U.S. government officials are taking a recent attack on the Internet's root servers very seriously, partly because it might have been a test shot fired over the Internet?s bow by a group with larger plans, and partly because the incident has sparked a fresh round of speculation about attack strategies that could in fact cripple the Net.