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Someone out there is testing out how to take down the internet.
A recent report from internet security company Verisign shows that digital attacks aimed at taking out the foundation of the internet are dramatically increasing.
The numbers show that distributed denial-of-service attacks against some of the biggest companies providing basic internet infrastructure have increased by 75 per cent since last year.
DDoS attacks are designed to take out websites by essentially flooding them with so much data they can’t process it all, and have to shut down.
Verisign’s report says the increasingly “frequent, persistent, and complex” attacks represent a “growing trend” of “attacks that probe for vulnerabilities” in internet infrastructure.
As online security expert Bruce Schneier wrote in a recent blog post, “these probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down.”
Schneier goes on to point out that the attacks seem to fit a certain profile: they are “significantly larger” than what companies are used to seeing, they last longer, they’re more sophisticated, “and they look like probing.”
He says the attacks are also configured in such a way as to see what the company's total defenses are, forcing them to pull out all the stops to hold them off, allowing the attackers to see what they’re made of.
“Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services,” he writes.
Verisign is a registrar that handles security for many of the internet’s top-level domains. It makes sure key pieces of the internet - like websites ending in .com or .net, as well as two of the internet’s root servers, stay online and stable.
Schneier points out that the attacks noted by Verisign are so troubling because if they succeed, the internet as we know it will cease to exist.
“If it goes down, there's a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains,” Schneier explains.
Like most high-level digital crime, the origin of the attacks is almost impossible to pin down, so the culprits behind the attacks remain unknown. But Schneier posits that the sophistication and volume of the attacks point to some form of state-sponsored hacking.
But what country, and for what purpose, is anyone’s guess.
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