Anyone who has ever had their internet e-mail go down, or not been able to access their on-line banking accounts, or sat around for half a day because the office connection to the world was dead, will have some appreciation for what it would be like to have major sections of the wired infrastructure disappear, as it did in Estonia a few weeks ago.
…the attacks, coming in waves, began to strike newspapers and television stations, then schools and finally banks, raising fears that what was initially a nuisance could have economic consequences.
The attacks have peaked and tapered off since then, but they have not ended, prompting officials there to declare Estonia the first country to fall victim to a virtual war.
Not as terrible as car-bombs going off in market places or places of worship but disruptive and possibly dangerous as well. That it is happening is particularly odd since the internet was invented specifically to allow communication networks to survive attacks on centralized locations. The data that makes up any particular communication on the internet is shaped into small packets with beginning and ending “couplers” and each encoded with the final destination address, then off they go from you to the recipient on any number of highways, to be reassembled at the end, sending back for any missing sections if needed. Great in theory, and mostly in practice, but clearly something is not working as envisioned. Not only in Estonia but all over the world, hackers have been able to bring networks to the ground through clever exploits or sheer swarming attacks.
Many geek hours are being spent to harden up the networks of the world. Some are suggesting there is no way to repair the existing webs and that whole new technologies and secure coding techniques will have to be created, implemented and deployed to overcome existing vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, keep a couple of hundred buck of real American money underneath your mattress for the day your own wires go down….