How to crash the Internet

“We know you can take down Web sites with Distributed Denial of
Service (DDoS) attacks. We know that a country, like Egypt, can
knock down a country’s entire Internet
infrastructure. And, we thought we knew that you
couldn’t take down the entire Internet. It
turns out we could be wrong.

“In a report from New Scientist, Max Schuchard a computer
science graduate student and his buddies claim
they’ve found a way to launch DDoS attacks on
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) network routers that could crash the
Internet.

“BGP is an essential Internet protocol. It’s
the routing protocol used to exchange routing information across
the Internet. Without it ISPs couldn’t connect
to each other and you couldn’t connect Web
sites and services outside of your local intranet. Because network
connections and routers are constantly changing, BGP routers and
switches are constantly working to keep current route maps of the
Internet. In short, you don’t want to mess
it.”

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