Communications Disruption - PART 2
Ξ May 10th, 2008 | → | ∇ Blog |
We can’t really discuss disrupting communications without talking about taking down the Internet. When you connect to the internet, you connect to an ISP ( Internet Service Provider). Think of your ISP as just a big LAN. For instance, when I log in using my road runner cable modem, I find myself on the road runner network. I can communicate with other Road Runner customers. For me to be able to communicate with users off the road runner network, road runner must peer with other networks on the Internet Backbone. The internet backbone consists of numerous Internet Exchange Points, which houses core routers.
One could disrupt these Internet Exchanges and take out the internet. You wouldn’t have to take out all of them, but by downing a bunch of them, TCP/IP packets would redirect to the others thus slowing down the Internet to a crawl. To disrupt the Internet Exchanges, you could either damage the building or just sever the communication lines going to the building.
I don’t recommend doing any of this of course. As a systems engineer, I tend to spend lots of time thinking of potential disasters. These posts have been just me thinking out loud. If it makes you feel better, this is the thought process that goes into making things even more secure.
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