The January AWS outages caused by one (admittedly big) company's error highlight the reliance America has on the Internet. What happens when it is attacked? Not cyber war--physically attacked in the real world.
The Internet was originally designed to be a resilient means of communication that could survive the massive disruptions caused by nuclear strikes and still find a path to get the message through. It is now a commercial necessity, and the resiliency that was a feature has been supplanted by efficiency requirements. Efficiency is the enemy of resiliency.
Cyber security is a major part of the online world. At one point I asked if the Internet could be physically attacked:
The experts seem to think the Internet can't be sufficiently attacked physically to knock it down. Yet their confidence seems based on assuming that no attackers could attack enough of the Internet's physical infrastructure to knock it down. Am I missing something (and I certainly could be--I'm a history major with a computer and not a computer major who knows history), or is this logic a bit circular?
But I wasn't really satisfied with that reassurance. After all, even back then there were physical choke points. The need for efficiency is even greater now, and I mentioned undersea cables as one set of growing bottle necks:
At the very least, the ocean-crossing links in the Internet are vulnerable to physical attack. And as the Internet evolves for commercial purposes, I imagine it will be even more vulnerable to attack in more ways. I wonder if those 13 critical computer sites I noted in 2007 are more or less important now?
So I don't think the problem is only via the undersea cables:
The internet is carried by around 500 fiber-optic undersea cables that are vulnerable to damage from natural disasters and man-made threats.
These are avenues vulnerable to physical attack. I just don't believe the land portion of the Internet is as secure from physical attacks in the real world as we think it is. I'm sure there are experts losing sleep at night over this.
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NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
