Posted on 12/11/2009 12:55:09 PM PST by FromLori
The 40-year-old system might be vulnerable to technical collapse or cyberattack, which could cause widespread chaos in fields from banking to health care to government.
When your Internet service goes down it's at best an inconvenience. If you rely on it for business, it can quickly cost you money.
The fight over 'net neutrality' So imagine: What happens if the Internet breaks? Picture people wandering the streets lost without GPS or maps on their iPhones, unable to pay for food or other goods with a simple swipe of a card.
Companies would have to resort to faxes and phone calls instead of e-mail; they'd quickly reach capacity and be unable to function. Credit cards wouldn't work; stores and hospitals would run short of supplies. Even electrical power to our homes could be disrupted. "It would be a mess," said Dave Marcus, the director of security research for McAfee (MFE, news, msgs). "You would be taking businesses that were designed to do all their point-of-sale and financial transactions through the Internet and going back to pen and paper and taking checks in a car to the bank. People would lose their minds."
On the 40th anniversary of the first transmission over the earliest version of the Internet, it's more than an idle question to examine the network's fragility. It's been more than 20 years since the last systemwide overhaul, and Internet infrastructure is still based on 1970s ideas about computer networks. Headline-making outages of popular Web sites such as YouTube and Twitter merely hint at the damage a full-blown failure could wreak. The Internet protocols that allow computers to communicate in networks have infiltrated every sector of our economy.
"The Internet has moved from being a toy or orn
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.moneycentral.msn.com ...
What if someone wrote some code that ran on all of the Cisco routers that make the internet run? That would break it.
What if someone somehow wrote some code that scrambled all of the DNS and IP Addresses to that each no longer correctly corresponded to the correct domains/web pages etc. That would break it.
What is someone wrote a foolproof hack that turned everyone’s PC into a zombies or turned all of the ISP servers into zombies. That would break it.
I’m attempting to balance my checkbook online. That could break it.
You can’t spam Ham radio!
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