MosNews
Terrorists will paralyze the Internet on August 26, a Russian expert in antivirus programs said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a conference hosted by Russian Information Agency
Novosti, Aleksandr Gostev from Kaspersky Labs said information on this terrorist attack was published on special websites. He did not elaborate.

First of all, the United States and Western Europe will suffer from
the attack, Gostev was quoted by the agency as saying. The head of
the labs, Yevgeny Kaspersky, reminded the audience that similar attacks had earlier paralyzed the Internet in South Korea. He added that it would be “impossible” to stop terrorist organizations if they “get down to business”.

The executive director of Dr.Web antivirus lab, Mikhail Bychinsky, quoted by Lenta.ru web agency said he had not heard of such an attack.
“I do not believe in mass internet attacks because the main servers
are defended, and Kaspersky Labs has been foretelling doomsday for a
long time.”
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50 quid says I can still get my hotmail by end of today lol.

I guess they could try concerted DoS attacks on the main trunk routers or top level DNS machines....

In principle it's possible but you'd need a truck load of resources, lots of Zombie PCs sending packets. The famous 'worm' incident in the 1980s did paralyse a lot of the Net for a while but there were fewer machines and next to no work had been done back then against hardening the Internet.

Even if you took down the DNS system, provided you knew the IP addresses of machines you wanted to talk to you could still manage quite nicely to retrieve e-mail, etc. by changing the address in to numeric format and so bypassing the initial DNS lookup. Depends on whether the servers you're talking to do any reverse lookups though. And if it were some sort of massive DoS attack then we can all just go and get a life for a while....:)

I doubt it will happen. There are more valuable networks to tak down than the Internet - the ones that most foks don't even know exist but rely on every day - SWIFT, BACS, etc.

Joe

Very true, it's always possible but the chances of it happening are very slim. And they'd need to get hold of a hell of a lot of resources like you say.

Originally posted by JoePritchard
There are more valuable networks to tak down than the Internet - the ones that most foks don't even know exist but rely on every day - SWIFT, BACS, Sheffield Forum etc.

Joe

Spot the difference in Joe's quote ;)

Back on topic, I would imagine this is a publicity stunt for Kaspersky? i.e. Look! We know something other companies don't, but we're not going to tell you how we know it... just use us...

Well hopefully anyway ;)

Associated news:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/26/cyberfud/

Don't worry, if the terrorists blow up the internet Al Gore can always make another one.

Originally posted by genesiscouch
Don't worry, if the terrorists blow up the internet Al Gore can always make another one.

Is that after he's re-written Love Story?

And single handedly removed every hanging chad in Florida?

And of course we rely on Sheffield Forum....I just chose not to state the obvious :)