I’ve lately been thinking of the scope and nature of cyber threats — mostly in writing a still-in-draft response to Jack Goldsmith’s recent defense of cybersecurity regulation. In the interest of furthering the debate, this article on How to Destroy the Internet is about as dark a vision as I’ve ever seen. From the introduction:
Remember when Anonymous threatened to destroy the entire internet? We laughed, and ultimately their words were just hacker hubris. But it got us thinking—could someone actually destroy the Internet? We did some digging, and guess what: With enough effort, the entire thing can be shattered. Physically. Completely. Here’s how to kill the net.
My candid assessment is that even this proposal is overly optimistic about capacity — but then again, until today I would have assessed the task as an impossibility.