The Internet will be taken down when we need it most

Originally posted by Alaskan Man
the internet isn't stored in one place, its so vast i think it would be impossible for even an army of hackers to take over the internet as a whole.

the only way i see the internet going down is if Internet Service Providers are told to turn it off.

there are only hundreds (maybe thousands) of ISP company's however your looking at billions possibly trillions of websites hosted on hundreds of thousands of servers.

quite the task.

[edit on 12/19/2009 by Alaskan Man]

Don't bother us with facts. Sheesh.

Like they said, after Swine mutates , they push the button and the internet is turned off. I heard its a big button in the basement of the pentagon.

You forgot the FEMA camps, is that next?

Another fear mongering post and people gobble it up.

GIVE US MORE DOOM...OUR LIVES ARE SO BORING AS IT IS!!!
d

Originally posted by MajesticJax

Originally posted by v3_exceed

Originally posted by expat2368
reply to post by Alaskan Man

 

I will not give any details because I do not want to give anyone any ideas but the Internet is very open to attack and not by hackers.

" The switches run on a variety of operating systems, primarily being Cisco. "

..Ex

Here ya go:

Businessweek

You invalidated your own argument.

Your link points to counterfeit Cicso parts and switches out of China. Considering the diversity of the internet and the number of switches out there I find it incredibly unlikely that these counterfeit parts has had much saturation at all. Believe it or not, most isp's that expect to stay in business don't buy their stuff on ebay.

Buying directly from Cisco, costs more, but has it's benefits.

..Ex

Come on guys!!! Here on ATS i am more of a reader than a writer. But cant u guys see all the dots connecting??? Well, it was here on ATS a few (6,7,8) months ago that people were saying that the media was pushung a war with Iran (its in is course already). It was here on ATS that lots of people were writing and advising people not to take any vaccine in the future (and not even the media was talking about the swine flu at the moment). Maybe im just an idiot, but since i follow ATS looks like this is where the real predictions take place. For me all the dots are connected and a few still connecting. Sorry for my english. God (whoever) bless.

Originally posted by Dark Ghost
The best way to shut down the Internet will be to stop people wanting to use it. The more people that feel threatened that their details are not secure, what they are browsing/researching IS being monitored, the less people will use it.

The only problems are that TPTB have gained financially from the Internet and its services and that the Internet itself would be very hard to shut down when so many people want to use it.

But I suppose Power>Money in their eyes. So maybe shutting down the Internet is a necessary sacrifice of money for more power.

Your kidding right? Not only can they NOT shut down the internet, the internet is the single largest employer on the planet. When you consider the amount of 3rd party employment that the internet generates, shutting it off would stifle the world economy at a level never before seen on the planet.

Business has migrated from post mail to email, from fax and phone to scype and attachments to emails. At any time and any where you look, the internet is having an effect on the businesses around you. If you think the economy is bad today, imagine what it would be like then. And please, before you say we used to run just fine without it, we used to use horses and buggy's, we used to heat our homes with wood.

The reality is, today's world cannot function without the internet for any real length of time without first going through an extreme level of duress.

..Ex

reply to post by jameshawkings


Although if it were the Iranians, would they not have somebody come here posting exactly what you are posting?

You offer no proof. Just propaganda as a statement of fact with no proof.

Just offering a counter argument unless of course you are an Iranian operative?

I doubt the CIA was involved. More likely the children in that Anonymous bunch growing bored with the Holidays already. Practicing up on the crimes that will eventually land them in Prison and teach them to be careful when bending over for soap.

I'm giving you a flag however for the creativity in finding a way to link a cyber-attack by a claimed Iranian group with the totally unrelated topic of the Swine Flu.

I applaud your theory - a very well crafted conspiracy which I think is quite thought-provoking as well as frightening. Tell me how you think this was put together and why.

Originally posted by underduck
The "Iranian Cyber Army"?

fantastic!

Can the internet really be "taken down"? I feel, just like with radio, there will always be the gurus who can whip something up with no less that a pop can, some duct tape, a discarded candy wrapper and an old cell phone. The internet is by far man's greatest accomplishment (IMHO) and I cant see it being brought to its knees without a serious fight. Even then we will find ways to communicate. It is hard wired into our brains. Life is stronger than any of mans ideas and it will power through just about anything we can devise and execute.

[edit on 19-12-2009 by underduck]

[edit on 19-12-2009 by underduck]

To answer your question, no. The internet and all of it's supporting architecture is so redundant in nature that it is literally impossible for anyone to take control of, or take it down. It would take many many collaborative saboteurs working simultaneously to even put a dent in it.

The only exception is in countries with very primitive networks and single threaded routes as we've seen in recent history due to "ship anchors" which I doubt. In the US it's impossible. Everything is so well intermeshed and multi-threaded it would not be possible.

It seems kinda unlikely that the internet could be shut down.
I do find it plausible that a false flag attack that unsuccessfully targets the internet would be a likely way to start a war.

Iranian Cyber Army = CIA.
they mixed letters but "remained" honest.

[edit on 19-12-2009 by eventHorizon]

Originally posted by v3_exceed
Your kidding right? Not only can they NOT shut down the internet, the internet is the single largest employer on the planet. When you consider the amount of 3rd party employment that the internet generates, shutting it off would stifle the world economy at a level never before seen on the planet.

Business has migrated from post mail to email, from fax and phone to scype and attachments to emails. At any time and any where you look, the internet is having an effect on the businesses around you. If you think the economy is bad today, imagine what it would be like then. And please, before you say we used to run just fine without it, we used to use horses and buggy's, we used to heat our homes with wood.

You are focussing on the wrong information. This thread is not really about debating whether the internet can or cannot be shut down. You are trapping yourself into a false sense of security by repeating "they could never shut it down, ever!" in your head. You should be looking at who might want to shut down the internet and their agenda for doing so. I hope people don't get caught up on the semantics of shutting down the internet and lose sight of the intent of the OP.

The reality is, today's world cannot function without the internet for any real length of time without first going through an extreme level of duress.

Exactly. That is the most important sentence in your post. Think about it.

When it comes to the infrastructure required to actually disable the internet, I think it's likely that TPTB would focus on this list first:

DNS SERVERS

I know that using the actual IP address in the browser will still get you to the site you want, though in the case of this website, the IP address is 75.126.76.151. If you type that into your browser with the http:// before it, you'll find a blank screen, but the ATS logo will be in the URL bar (using the latest Safari). You can look up most IP addresses using this site: IP ADDRESS LOOKUP

I don't think it's realistic to think that the internet can actually be brought down, but the DNS Servers can certainly be attacked en-masse and you'd effectively shut it down for 99% of the users who don't even know what an IP address is.

Perhaps ATS ought to put together a page where people can come should something like this actually happen and have it be IP Address only. That way we don't need a DNS Server at all to access it. Pre-planning isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if we can all jump on here when TSHTF and keep each other as informed as possible.

Like it or not, the internet has become a focal point for most people. We don't know the people living two doors down from us, but we know hundreds of people online. If we were to suddenly lose this medium of communication, it would spin the vast majority into a panic when they all did what would come natural, and pick up their cell phones. If the cell system was also affected (because we've read stories about TPTB having direct access to all of the phone lines for their data gathering purposes) you'd see the society we have right now crumble rather quickly.

To be perfectly honest with you, I'm surprised a "test" hasn't been conducted with an area to see how people reacted. Perhaps they are worried that a test of this nature would expose the weaknesses in the system that they are going to exploit and don't want to bring them to people's attention.

reply to post by the_denv


You made the point. And such intra/inter nets exist and are growing for many years. In Prague there is huge community network named czfree.net for example. It is build by enthusiasts. Many of nodes are connected through different ISPs (cable,DSL,fibre ...) to internet aside of main gateways. Mode of operation is similar to MESH wifi model with dynamic gateways. It is parallel to "official" internet infrastructure. This network can be crippled only by EMP and if this happen it can be restored in few days because enthusiasts tend to keep old equipment (our company have still working PCs dated back to 1988). There are many community servers connected to this network with huge amount of data also. Some guys build their setups with EMP possibility in mind - I'm moving all our servers in to newly reconstructed basement for example and I'll try to protect racks. It will not be perfect but better do something then latter cry.

"THEY can't take down the internet!!!"



hahaha.
And they said the Titanic couldn't be sunk, either.

for the ones saying that internet is this or that

you could just hit dns servers and then .. internet is gone ... well, for the most people, the only way to access would be though direct IP address

you could just shutdown some nodes that prevent communication with the outside, like if you want to isolate US, you could ... just shutdown the borders of the internet ... that shouldnt be hard for the ones in control. ..

but lets assume they do that, DNS SHUTDOWN, .. so, you dont know the ip address for a site, but the site owner contacts people though other communication methods and we all access some IP

ok, then they just would need to control the traffic of the internet, since 99,9% of the people wont be accessing the internet, so it would be really easy to control the accesses and u just would need to take down the server containing that IP address/ website you dont want them to access ...

[edit on 20-12-2009 by Faiol]

Clif High referred to this very topic during the latest Veritas:

Originally posted by Faiol
for the ones saying that internet is this or that

you could just hit dns servers and then .. internet is gone ... well, for the most people, the only way to access would be though direct IP address

you could just shutdown some nodes that prevent communication with the outside, like if you want to isolate US, you could ... just shutdown the borders of the internet ... that shouldnt be hard for the ones in control. ..

but lets assume they do that, DNS SHUTDOWN, .. so, you dont know the ip address for a site, but the site owner contacts people though other communication methods and we all access some IP

ok, then they just would need to control the traffic of the internet, since 99,9% of the people wont be accessing the internet, so it would be really easy to control the accesses and u just would need to take down the server containing that IP address/ website you dont want them to access ...

[edit on 20-12-2009 by Faiol]

Having run a hosting company for the past 13 years or so, I can assure you that hitting every DNS server is completely impossible. There is no "Ultra kill switch" that can just shut down DNS globally.

If, in your example, by some magical method, DNS was to globally fail, then "Hosts redirection" could be achieved in the manner you suggest. On your windows system there is a hosts file (no extension) that supersedes the external lookup that your system would normally do when looking up a website.

Now, there are MANY different protocols on the internet that do not rely on dns. NNTP, FTP among others do not require dns servers to operate, but still constitute being part of the "Internet". Now there are ways to mess with the internet, but DNS servers have long been hardened against it.

..Ex

Have we considered what could happen when the ISPs shut down or file bankruptcy when things turn really bad next year?

reply to post by v3_exceed


Thanks for your input in this thread. I've found it most interesting and informative. As you are up in Canada and I am here in the Seattle area, the Olympics is a huge thing for this area, and Vancouver in specific. Should something happen, and I'm not saying that it will, but should something happen (not even at the Olympics itself but in Canada & the US), is there some way that the NSA or some other agency could isolate an entire region, or large area, effectively blinding the people of what's going on?

Maybe they don't need to take the whole system down, but rather just chunks of it. After all, would it matter if people in Texas knew what was going on in Washington and British Columbia, but not the people in the affected area? I'm just curious. I'm sure our governments have thought about ways to isolate and quarantine information within a region. If we can think it up, certainly they already have.

Hopefully NOTHING negative happens during the Olympics, but it's something that has me nervous for some reason, and I fear a shutdown of the internet in this area to prevent negative news from getting out or being shared until the governments have already made their moves.

Originally posted by Exopolitico
Have we considered what could happen when the ISPs shut down or file bankruptcy when things turn really bad next year?

Believe it or not, this happens quite regularly. I often get calls from people who have had their host just stop answering the phone. Their sites stop responding and their email quits. They are distraught that they might lose their domain and for many this is a very stressful time.

This is the natural ebb and flow of the business world. Since we aren't banks, we don't get the golden parachute, but are expected to run our businesses responsibly. Do you really expect a 3$ a month host to be reliable?

Looking up websites to their IP addresses. To do this, you don't need a website, simple open a command prompt type nslookup www.abovetopsecret.com press enter. To get to a cmd prompt. Click start >> run >> cmd >> enter (in Linux/unix any terminal will do)

Now with respect to any gain to shut down the internet. All governments, most businesses need the internet to cost effectively distribute their propaganda or information. For any one group to have the power to kill the internet would be such an extreme amount of leverage that no industrialized nation would allow it. For this reason alone, the internet has evolved into an extremely resilient organism. The very nature of switched packet networks is to reroute information on an "as needed" basis. Shutting down all of the routing points in the USA would have little effect on Canada's internal segment and the same could be said of most countries.

With respect to the OP, there is a better possibility of TPTB shutting off our air supply than shutting off the internet. Not only can it not be done, doing so would cost so much money and disrupt so much infrastructure that many cities would not be able to operate. If a terrorist were able to in any fashion, it would have already been done.

..Ex