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.

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.

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.

The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever according to officials at key online backbone organizations.

A nuclear attack on New York City wouldn't be enough to stop stock trading, if the New York Stock Exchange gets its way. It's thinking of moving from its home of the past 210 years to build a second exchange, perhaps in an underground bunker, so the market could open the day after.

While warnings pervade government and the media, doomsday scenarios of cyberterrorism that result in massive deaths or injury remain largely the stuff of Hollywood scripts or conspiracy theory. Although it is possible for electronic intrusions to damage infrastructure and threaten physical danger, taking control of those systems from the outside is extremely difficult, requires a great deal of specialized knowledge and must overcome non-computerized fail-safe measures. As a result, government and corporate security experts--while careful not to dismiss the gravity of the issue--point to this indisputable fact: It is still easier to bomb a target than to hack a computer.

In a mock cyberwar enacted by faculty of the US Naval War College and analysts from Gartner, participants were unable to 'shut down civilization' using cyberwarfare techniques, casting doubts on the threat from cyberterrorists.

The authors argue that internet worms and viruses could easily take-down the entire internet by subverting upwards of 10,000,000 hosts. They argue for a "Center for Disease Control" analog for virus- and worm-based threats to national cybersecurity, and sketch some of the components that would go into such a Center.

Paul Kurtz, director of Critical Infrastructure Protection for the White House, outlined the Bush administration's strategy for protecting the national critical infrastructure, including expanding partnerships with the private sector and encouraging information sharing among companies to avoid cyberattacks.

A row is brewing over the reliability and security of the servers that direct much of the net's traffic.
Some of the organisations that oversee the net's domains are calling on the internet's ruling body to give guarantees about the safe running of these crucial servers.