Is It Possible To Destroy The Internet?

[SNiped 0]

All the internet is, is a network between computers out side of your local biulding. So by that you could not totally take down the internet, as you would have to take down every single provider and every single internet modem in the world. Long story Short, alot of work. CLose to impossible.

[rowtc2 0]

It is like television destroied. If the search engines will be virused,or non-existing some way, the Internet will be crash ..

[iGuest 3]

Not sure, But it was similar to the internet being destroyed. Right after Sept 11 the government shut down access to the internet, as far as I know, it shut down everywhere, and Big Business was pissed as well. I heard Escalon was involved in its shutdown. I know it started a stir online once it was turned back on, It's shuttdown was something noone knew could even happen. I am wondering if it was shut down just inthe US or all over, or just certain areas in the US. Just a thought.-Master Ascension

[elhadi 0]

It's Impossible

[jopak134 0]

if you mean possible you alone then no. but if your a terrorist group maybe.destory all connection going outside a country of all countries. and then destroy the internet one by one.also destorying the transmission lines by just 50mins will maxout the bandwith and cause the server to crash. so i think it's possible but highly unlikely.

[Alquallaf 0]

We gotta be really unlucky for that to happen, impossible i think.There isn't a way to take down the internet. Not permanently anyway. The most you can do is take out an area at a time by destroying the systems at an Internet Hosting Provider. Even then you wouldn't really be able to destroy it all completely. People would still have the internet. Plus without Internet, the economy would drop, communication would have to go back to telephone, and all hell would break loose.Life would be boring without internet x_X

Notice from electriic_ink:

Removed "quote" from the OP, which wasn't in QUOTE tags anyway.

Edited March 30, 2008 by electriic ink (see edit history)

[FLaKes 0]

I definitely think that the internet could be destroyed. The only way of destroying it that I can think of, is by a super mega ultra virus, capable of attacking all the internet servers at a very super ultra fast speed all at once. This virus would be capable of destroying all information on the servers regardless of the operating system, but I doubt something like that would be very hard to do. The creators would have to have knowledge of many types of operating systems and ..... but now that I think about it.... many hosting providers have all their information backed up.... So I guess that even if they destroy the information on these servers, they could easily restore the information and the virus would be no good.... Now I have to think on another idea to destroy the internet...

[okeefe 0]

my friend the internet can never be destroyed it is apart of everything we do

[SkyStormKuja 0]

That is a silly answer. The internet is mainly held up by a large array of huge computers called the "backbone" of the internet. These computers are powerful, and well protected, and thus, very difficult to attack. But coupled with this is the fact that many of them have backups, meaning that anything you change would soon be up again. Also, there is a hellava lot of them. And it's not so easy to trace each and every one, as the tracert paths would be different depending from where you connect.A "mega super virus" wouldn't destroy the internet. A virus can only be sent through certain routes, and only if allowed through. Even if you wrote a virus that can enter port 80, and infect the webserver, the rest of the computer could isolate it, and clean it. Getting through that would take a lot of programming on the virus side.And to destroy the whole internet would mean you need to DoS attack every single backbone computer (or at least more than 6/7th of it I believe) which is quite impossible to do. As you attack one, the other will have already been restored.

[hitmanblood 0]

OK, I see that all of you are in fact thinking in some other direction and probably opposite to me. So what is the point here we are talking about destruction of internet and nothing else not if it is possible to write virus strong enough to kill all the computers and so on it is certainly possible but anti virus companies are working around clock to produce virus and to produce things that will kill them, the problem here is how to effectively destroy internet.

I am not sure if some of you are aware how internet works. I see that people are mentioning internet backbone and DDoS attacks (DDoS stands for distributed denial of service) its an attack where person has many computer slaves or zombie computer if you like it in that way and starts pinging some server it can be turned on against web site or against servers and some are already mention in the wikipedia. There were also attacks on the internet backbone it is group of servers that is handling all the traffic over the internet. There are currently two internet backbones one is largely in the ownership of american that is US united states government and other is financed from the EU european union however this one is not in ownership of any company that is companies grant servers and bandwidth however they don't owe it and it is run by groups of volonteres. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dos_attack

Today the strongest bot network is STORM and it probably could collapse parts of internet and seriously harm the fluid work of internet all over the world however they are used more for the sending spam and so on and they haven't been used for the DoS attacks at least not yet and they haven't been and signs that STORM network will be used in the future for any DoS attacks though as I have already said it might prove to be powerful enough.

One other thing is to break connections between continents since most of the traffic between continets goes trough undersee cables optical cables that connect continent with each other since sattelite networks are not powerful enough at least not yet so we are using underwater see cables to send information from one continet to the other. The recent attack I am not sure how many of you are in fact familiar with this "attack" that happened but connection to India from Europe has been hampered seriously in last months when three optical cables that connect europe to the africa and near east were cut and by that seriously hampering connection of the europe to the indian subconinet and by that harming india's outsourcing industry. This is one way to hamper internet via cutting communication links and one organized action would do quite some damage if all teh cables would be cut. This kind of attack would be probably led with some new technology in place and strong company behind it.

On the other hand what I would like to mention as serious and almost certain destruction of internet would be series of EMPs (electro magnetic pulses) these would destroy most of the servers and most of the home computers that you and me are using. Though military internal networks would be intact most of other ususual people like you and me wouldn't have any chance and would not be able to connect to the informations and everything else connected to the internet effectively destroying world economy and producing chaos all over the world.

This is the only certain way that would destroy the internet probably for many years and it would destroy it for good.

EMP can be produced by exploding nuclear bomb on certain hight. This would not in facct harm people however it would destroy all of electronical components like new cars television sets well most of teh casual things you and I am used to in todays world.

[tricky77puzzle 0]

Actually, while it may not be possible to remove the internet, it is possible to create a way to stop people from using it.
Have you heard of, "Digital Doomsday"? This is a theory that, what with all the internet hackers getting smarter every day, soon someone will have figured out a way to send a powerful virus to everyone connected to the internet, with the ability to permanently jam the connections. This basically will make the internet useless, which is just as bad as destroying it, really.

This actually happened once, in 2001, I think. But all systems were back up in about three days. So, it's not possible to destroy the Internet. People will just find ways to put it back up again, after the hackers destroy it. You can't shoot down the Internet and expect it to stay down. It's immortal, basically.

[sanjiv 0]

why would you want to destroy the internet?even if someone found a way it will be their loss aswell as the planets

[hitmanblood 0]

why would you want to destroy the internet?even if someone found a way it will be their loss aswell as the planets

Hmmm, I think that you haven't spent enough time thinking about it there are so many anarchist groups all over the world and terrorist organizations who would certainly prefer to see internet going down. Opposite to the good sides of the internet like sharing of informations making contacts easier and of course business.

Important thing is that such groups prefer to harm people. I and you probably don't see good reasons or we see good reasons but we cannot understand them behind suicide bombers however such guys exist and they will stop at nothing to destroy foreign property (referring to property of foreign countries in theirs). And sometimes even against their own government. So you see terrorism has all the requirements one would have to destroy the internet.

On the other hand I have mentioned anarchist movements which would probably like to see internet destroyed since this would be the first step of spreading misinformations and other things that could push the world into anarchy. I hope you all get my point here.

And to conclude I would like to say that though many groups would prefer to see internet going down they probably lack organization and finances to organize and spread themselves all over the world to destroy it.

However remember if they lack support today it doesn't mean that they would lack support tomorrow.

[gaspe86 0]

Actually, while it may not be possible to remove the internet, it is possible to create a way to stop people from using it.
Have you heard of, "Digital Doomsday"? This is a theory that, what with all the internet hackers getting smarter every day, soon someone will have figured out a way to send a powerful virus to everyone connected to the internet, with the ability to permanently jam the connections. This basically will make the internet useless, which is just as bad as destroying it, really.

Permanently? That would be permanent either... probably it will last as long as everyone re-booting there system. Yet, I am interested to know how such virus would infect every single computer connected to the internet at ones... what happens to those that where disconnected and connected later on after such event took place? Many question so little time. By the way... why would you would someone make such a virus... more likely who? The producers of Anti-Virus? XD

[lailai 0]

Actually, while it may not be possible to remove the internet, it is possible to create a way to stop people from using it.
Have you heard of, "Digital Doomsday"? This is a theory that, what with all the internet hackers getting smarter every day, soon someone will have figured out a way to send a powerful virus to everyone connected to the internet, with the ability to permanently jam the connections. This basically will make the internet useless, which is just as bad as destroying it, really.

Yes, but this won't be happening. Because the fixers (or safers or whatever) are getting smarter every day as well. And there would be no way to send a virus to EVERYONE. At least not today