If I were a malicious hacker, I wouldn't try to take down the DNS system because then I can't hack anything. The DNS will bring you down with it.

Taking down DNS wouldnt affect a "hacker". its like taking away a phone book from a prank caller. It doesnt affect the prank caller, they just need to know what numbers to dial.

Taking out DNS isn't going to break anything much. There are local caches and mirrors all over the place, and always the fallback of using IP addresses directly. Worst case would be a day or two of localized outage, with those responsible for managing it being well-able to get it back. Otherwise it's just so distributed that it can reasonably be considered impervious to anything other than a co-ordinated simultaneous strike.

Any realistic threat to the internet would have to be really deep-cover, something that's virtually undetectable until it's had the chance to propagate virtually world-wide, but still damaging enough to take stuff out. Even with the nightmare scenario of a colossal solar flare we'd still have a day or two advance notice; it's not going to hit us without us being aware it's coming and we're going to be able to take mitigating measures.

If it went down, I would finally get things done. ;)

Detonating a nuke in the ionosphere could theoretically cause an EMP powerful enough to sent the US back to the stone age.

The issue is these hardware makers are trying to remove options for storage from the devices. Like the macbook with no other ports other than that single USB charging port.

Um, one USB port is still one USB port. And you don't need wires to connect devices and back them up these days, even in the absence of the internet or cell towers.

You make it sound like there's some kind of conspiracy at the highest levels to render society more vulnerable to extermination of all information via some theoretical massive electronic attack... Reality is far more benign.

I read an article on the BBC news website about theoretical Internet breaking attacks. The best one was to find where the main cables cross land In some remote location e.g. The middle of Australia or siberia, you then dig it up carefully, cut it and splice in a device that inserts random line noise.

Because the link is still up people at the noc will just think the link is busy but the speed will drop from gigabit per second to megabits per second. A coordinated attack doing this worldwide would have massive consequences for the net as a whole as searching the entire globe for the disruptive hardware and searching all the cables would be nigh on impossible... Sod DNS, this is plain evil... :lol:

The main question is not whether it is likely to happen, but more to ask what do we have in place for such an attack which is, though perhaps unlikely, still possible.

I live in Georgia where ice storms don't usually interrupt our way of living, but last year it was chaos everywhere almost when it iced. The thing that made it bad is that we had insufficient tools to deal with it.

I could also go on to say something about the defense systems that were in place, but perhaps not working so well when 9/11 happened. I am not paranoid myself. I still have a flip phone. Just wondering.

The main question is not whether it is likely to happen, but more to ask what do we have in place for such an attack which is, though perhaps unlikely, still possible.

Well...

You could just go outside....

The main question is not whether it is likely to happen, but more to ask what do we have in place for such an attack which is, though perhaps unlikely, still possible.

Well...

You could just go outside....

There's always the single player campaign...

The 3-2-1 rule still applies. At least 3 copies, at least 2 media, at least 1 off site.

Not sure I understand the "at least 2 media" part. What counts as "media"? DVDs? External harddrives not actively plugged in except right when backing up? In your own personal/family data, what do you do?

Does your "actively in use" count as a "copy", or are you saying "3 copies not including the original"?