August 28th, 2008 @ 3:10 pm
by Zack Whittaker

A brief overview of how the Internet came about: some years ago, some military boffs thought it’d be awesome if computers could talk to each other, so the US could nuke the hell out of other countries without actually being near there. A smart professor from England then came up with an idea to plug on top of the original idea, to make text and pictures appear on a screen. Some years passed, some boring developments and company takeovers, and now we have the Internet.

Since then, crime has moved from the streets of our major cities to our houses, criminal masterminds (usually plain idiots actually) started stealing credit/debit card details from people, students started creating viruses to infect other people’s computers - why, I still can’t work out; child sex offenders used the web to cause even more ongoing pain and suffering for children and their families, emails sent out without direction promoting Viagra to anyone and everyone, and finally, people trying to attack the very heart(s) of the infrastructure to bring the whole thing crumbling down.

Over the last few weeks, there’s been new research done which could manipulate the primary-core DNS servers, so hackers could take you from what you thought was www.google.com to www.somebadsite.com instead. Thankfully I don’t think it’s been put into practise yet, but it’s still a major, if not the most major flaw/security hole to face the web today. Whatever you want to call it - it’s really bloody bad.

Terrorism is essentially a “targeted attack against people or inter/national infrastructure”. We’ve seen this in the London train bombs; hitting England’s capital’s underground transport network - we’ve seen this also when terrorists released sarin on the Tokyo subway some years ago. The Internet is an international infrastructure, and words cannot really express how bad the situation would be if the Internet fell.