Don’t mess with our lolcats, or we will fuck you up.
Remember that post I made about Sci-fi writers joining the war on terror where I described how we can’t even defend ourselves from a Distributed Denial of Service attack (just like Livejournal is facing right now)?
Well, twice in the history of Teh Intarweb, a DDoS attack was performed on what’s termed the DNS Backbone, in an attempt to shut down the internet as a whole. These are the (now 13) main servers that translate your request for “meebo.com” into “69.36.250.253”, which points to the actual server those files sit on, and if they all go down, the internet (more-or-less) goes dark. Well, that’s debatable, but let’s move on shall we?
This is in reference to the second attack, that happened this February:
The attack began at 10:30 UTC, and lasted about five hours. Although none of the servers crashed, two of the root servers reportedly “suffered badly”, while others saw “heavy traffic”. The botnet responsible for the attack has reportedly been traced to South Korea. [2]
On February 8, 2007 it was announced by Network World that “If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nation’s critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source.”[3] This is likely due to one of the DNS root servers being under the control of the United States Department of Defense.
Now that I did not know. Interesting, how our gov’t has reserved the right to nuke the crap out of anyone who keeps us from our daily distractions, eh? Normally, I’d feel kind of uncomfortable, but actually, that puts me at ease.
I mean, c’mon, that’s our porn (nsfw) they’re threatening! Talk about a low blow.
As long as the internet survives long enough to see Book 7 of Harry Potter and the subsequent wank explosion, I’m good.
Duly noted.
Nuke ’em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
I think “all out cyberwar” is something like step 4 on the way to a cyberpunk future. So I’m all for it.
Mmm, a very sound point.
Never, ever forget that the Internet began its life in part as DARPANET, by and for the benefit of the US Armed Forces. In many ways, we’re just living off their excess bandwidth.
It’s not surprising at all that they’re willing to do this sort of thing in order to protect their comm channel. I just hope the people doing it don’t live anywhere near me.
I keep meaning to run my own DNS server (Comcast’s seems to run on soviet hydraulic technology, with all the reliability that implies) but the ways I found were all linux so I gave up.