Could One Person Take Down the Internet?

 

by Dylan Love 

If you want to commit the greatest conceivable act of terrorism and declare a version of war against every country on the planet, you only need to take the world offline.

So many facets of human life are nowadays facilitated by a giant machine called "the internet," which networks the world to unlock all kinds technological convenience. By instantaneously moving information from one place to another, the internet touches everything we depend on in 2016 — our transportation systems, our mortgage payments, and our Amazon purchases alike. To say goodbye to it permanently wouldn't be like losing a limb; it would require a whole new worldview. 

Malicious actors have previously made parts of the internet disappear for some people. It happened as recently as October, when a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a company called Dyn temporarily made A-list services like Reddit, Twitter, and Spotify evaporate. Acting as a type of phone book for the internet, Dyn provides domain name system services to these and many more sites, so when you type, say, "www.facebook.com" into your browser, Dyn translates this into the numerical IP address of the server you want to access. 

Click here for the full article. 

Source: NBC News