After the attack on Friday, which paralysed part of the u.s. web for several hours, a question surfaced : someone seeks to destroy the web ? In the opinion of many specialists of the computer security, the worst is still to come…
Sunday, we were talking about the cyber attack, which took place at the end of the week against the company, Dyn, the consequences of which collaterals have touched big names of the web such as Paypal, Twitter, Amazon and thousands of other web sites. You probably remember another article where we indicated that someone tries to destroy the web, It seems that the worst is still to come…
The cyber attack of Dyn is only one step to destroy the web
Many feel that evoke the end of the internet is just a topic to make the buzz, the “a bitch to click ” to use a term very fashionable as soon as one disagrees with an article. It seems, however, that the analyses of several experts in cyber security are increasingly based, a group of hackers or a country is trying to destroy the web. Bruce Schneier, a specialist on computer security had issued a warning a few weeks ago, indicating that hackers were canvassing the weak points of the internet…
Even if we do not know the perpetrators of the attack Friday, it is impossible not to draw a parallel with a series of DDoS attacks (denial of service attacks) which aim mainly at the infrastructure of the web, in order to test their resistance, and that has been taking place for several months. By way of comparison, in 2015, the largest DDoS attack recorded was of 334 gigabytes per second, the recent attacks amounting to more than 1 000 gigabits per second !
This explosion of the ability to conduct cyber attacks increasingly strong, long and repeated is in part due to the democratization of connected objects. In effects,, cameras, televisions, refrigerators, watches, assistants, maids, robots, allies perfect for conducting DDoS attacks, because they are many, are permanently connected to the web and the security of many of them clearly leaves something to be desired.
The hackers have to exploit a flaw to turn them into army working for a botnet, whose role will be to flood a website of millions of queries to the crash. The irony of history, the attacks have become so large that the web giants can no longer manage themselves and outsource the management of their DNS to the providers, who therefore become even more interesting for hackers, since instead of hitting a popular site, they can bring down several.
This is precisely what happened on Friday with the company Dyn, a platform centralizing a quarter of a million addresses, DNS and redirecting the flow from the internet to the hosts by translating the names of the sites to an IP address. The company having as clients : Twitter, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Netflix, the Boston Globe, Amazon, Financial Times, The Guardian, Reddit, Airbnb, New York Times, and so on, A part of the u.s. web collapsed for many hours.
The worst is still to come and the internet is clearly under threat
Ben Johnson, ex-hacker working for the us agency of intelligence for the NSA said : “These attacks, in particular, with the expansion of connected objects and unsecured, will continue to harass our organizations. Unfortunately, what we see is only the beginning in terms of +botnets+ on a large scale and disproportionate harm “. He added : “the Internet continues to be based on protocols and an infrastructure designed before cyber security was a problem “.
This is the problem, when the internet was created the infrastructure have not been developed to take into account that someone would seek to saturate the network with as many queries to its key points. Some submarine cables, for example, dating back to the beginning of the century are at the limit of the capacity of certain attacks in terms of throughput, which means that it is possible to bring down the internet in some countries. For example, as shown in the site Atlantico the cable ” Lion “, connecting Madagascar, Reunion and Mauritius, has a maximum capacity of 1 280 gigabits per second, such an attack in addition to the traffic normal internet, could cripple all of these countries. The exponential progress of cyber attacks and the power of the hit go faster than the ability to adapt the global network, in theory some scholars evoke the possibility that one day the world wide web can be affected by massive attacks and urge governments to act more effectively on the subject.
Some are pointing the finger at China or Russia, but it is not impossible that a powerful group of criminals will be transformed into cyber-mercenaries, putting their skills and their botnets to the services of someone willing to pay to cripple entire societies, countries and who knows one day, the internet… the Bleak prospects !
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