For reasons that you have seem some express on this list and others. There are alot of people who have gone to a great length to build in Security, redundancy and scalability on the Internet infrastructure today. So what you are prescribing is theoretically possible but not realistic because too many parties would have to be involved to achieve such an effect. This is not to say that the Internet does not have its weak spots and i will mention a few in no particular order. 1) Too many hosts (read end user devices) on the Internet are dependent on one vendor for instance Microsoft products. We have seen the impact this has on operational stability for end users on the Internet repeatedly and most recently the Conficker worm. The same is repeated over many other vendors software applications used by services that are critical on the internet. The impact of such systems failing is not the main concern but the cascading effect this may result in. 2) The DNS - The entire internet is inherently dependent on this DNS resolution process. As it stands, the hierarchical structure of this system has several weak points. This has been ably demonstrated in the past and most recently by Dan Kaminsky 3) BGP Routing - The Internet depends on the this protocol to route packets to their destination. This protocol lacks fool proof security and is dependent on trust relationships between the different service provider tiers. Repeatedly this trust relationship has been cast to doubt with Routing Hijacks a not so recent one being on Google's You Tube and also our very own Africa Online. The weak points in the above three have created opportunities for those with the skills and time to launch small and large scale attacks with an intent to "bring down the Internet". a) An Amplified and Sustained DoS and DDoS constant threat to the Internet's stability. b) As mentioned viruses, spam etc are another way of disrupting the normal operations of the Internet. The two above focus on flooding the Internet bandwidth capacities and overloading servers beyond their current limits. This has had relative success. This method was successfully used to launch cyber wars against a small country called Estonia in 2007 in Eastern Europe. As a result, the folks whose main job is to ensure the internet remains stable have reviewed many scenarios and put measures in place to mitigate against such attacks on a global scale that would render the internet unusable (not down) :) The most important bit of it all is the collaboration that exists between various operators of critical infrastructures and willing to deal with such threats. As i mentioned, its possible to bring down parts of the Internet, but not the whole. This was very possible about 10 - 15yrs back. But alot of Security, Scalability and Redundancy has been build into the Internet that its no longer practically possible. But then again the Internet is full of surprises :) Regards, Michuki. saich wrote:
I not mean one website or one organization's connection to the internet.....i meant the entire World Wide Web whether its the physical infrastructure or the software part