Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8538146" data-attributes="member: 6790260">You're going to want either a DDOS against critical functions, or some kind of (relatively) minimally-invasive virus that intentionally pulls the kind of stunt that Facebook accidentally inflicted on itself last year, or to exploit some unknown weakness in code that permits the kind of error Greggy C described.A DDOS is a &quot;distributed denial-of-service&quot; attack. It works by having a distributed (that is, many individual machines that need not be located in the same place) botnet (a large semi-automated network following some kind of commands). DDOS attacks work by flooding; they overload server capacity so no one else can get data in or out. Being distributed makes them harder to fight, as the defender may need to filter thousands or millions of unrelated IP addresses or the like. This is why services like Cloudflare exist, to insulate sites from being directly attacked in this way.The other is more likely to cause problems if it works at all, but harder to actually implement. Facebook's collapse was caused by a seemingly minor coding error that prevented its servers from forming new connections to outside sources; as existing connections expired, it became slower and slower until eventually the last one expired and it was isolated from the Internet. (Apparently this caused some issues with even reaching the servers to fix them as it messed with their electronic security stuff!) So if you can somehow get some code injected into a critical component, like DNS (Domain Name System, the thing that lets 72.190.205.14 or whatever be accessed via &quot;<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">www.google.com</a>&quot;) or certificate verification or the like, you could bring the Net down for a good long while. Couple it with a zombie apocalypse and...yeah the Net ain't comin' back.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8538146, member: 6790260"] You're going to want either a DDOS against critical functions, or some kind of (relatively) minimally-invasive virus that intentionally pulls the kind of stunt that Facebook accidentally inflicted on itself last year, or to exploit some unknown weakness in code that permits the kind of error Greggy C described. A DDOS is a "distributed denial-of-service" attack. It works by having a distributed (that is, many individual machines that need not be located in the same place) botnet (a large semi-automated network following some kind of commands). DDOS attacks work by flooding; they overload server capacity so no one else can get data in or out. Being distributed makes them harder to fight, as the defender may need to filter thousands or millions of unrelated IP addresses or the like. This is why services like Cloudflare exist, to insulate sites from being directly attacked in this way. The other is more likely to cause problems if it works at all, but harder to actually implement. Facebook's collapse was caused by a seemingly minor coding error that prevented its servers from forming new connections to outside sources; as existing connections expired, it became slower and slower until eventually the last one expired and it was isolated from the Internet. (Apparently this caused some issues with even [I]reaching[/I] the servers to fix them as it messed with their electronic security stuff!) So if you can somehow get some code injected into a critical component, like DNS (Domain Name System, the thing that lets 72.190.205.14 or whatever be accessed via "[URL='http://www.google.com']www.google.com[/URL]") or certificate verification or the like, you could bring the Net down for a good long while. Couple it with a zombie apocalypse and...yeah the Net ain't comin' back. [/QUOTE]

Verification