"First, I would like to make it perfectly clear that I am publishing my twisted and evil method for destroying the internet without any intent to encourage anyone to actually do it. If in fact anyone does this, my Ninja Death Squad will be dispatched to hunt you down and make you watch Powerpuff Girls until you die of cerebral hemmorage.

Part of the art of being a Mad Overlord is that it is quite enough to know how to wreak chaos and devastation. You don't actually have to go and do it (it's messy, there are more fun things to do, and it attracts the unwelcome attentions of the Forces of Goodness, who are real party-poopers).

Thus, this method is published for three reasons; first, and most importantly, to impress you with my evil and devious mind; in the hopes that a certain company whose software will almost certainly be used in carrying out this attack (if someone is so clueless as to try it) will get their act together and put some extra effort into making it more difficult; and finally, in an effort to broadly disseminate knowledge of the technique so that it can be discussed and countermeasures developed."

http://www.madoverlord.com/Projects/BYEBYENET.t

How is this new? Have you heard of botnets? Read the "spam capacity" figures for the largest botnets, and you will see that not only is this possible, but if you have the money and connections to find the owners of the botnets, it could be done tomorrow.

But the internet itself won't be destroyed. You couldn't possibly target the millions of servers out there simultaneously, and taking out individual pieces of infrastructure would only mean a temporary loss of capacity.

The internet is built on trust that individual users won't abuse their bandwidth by using 100% of it all of the time, and that ISPs will identify and restrict users who do so. As it is, most of the spam and DDoS attacks come from three or four rogue ISPs out of the hundreds. Putting internet-wide restrictions and "countermeasures" destroys the fundamental freedom of the internet and would reduce its creative and economic power.

The main way to reduce botnets in general is diversity of software. No software is invulnerable to security holes, so when one surfaces it is bad to have 90%+ of computers vulnerable simultaneously. So I think one of the most effective measures we could take is to end the single-company domination of the PC market and have a wide range of OSs, server software, and hardware architectures availible. I'm not specifically saying MS is worse; a >90% Mac OS X market would be just as vulnerable.

What would happen if the internet was "destroyed" ?

The Internet can't be destroyed....

unless there are no more computers...

Not a lot. Every IP address you requested would return 'not found'.

The problem is the definition of "internet". Does that mean the physical network, or the existence of the Internet Protocol, or the World Wide Web, or the ISPs, or web servers themselves? As long as you had physically seperate cabling, you could make your own WAN (like a LAN, but very long distance) using Internet Protocol and could call it 'an internet'. It wouldn't be 'the internet'.

If the tubes are still physically connected then the internet is not destroyed - if they were broken it would take years to install new tubes

Doesn't always help... apparently bot herders are moving up using vulnerabilities in trusted aplications which means no matter the OS, the computer will be infected. PHP exploits, that kind of stuff.

Doesn't always help... apparently bot herders are moving up using vulnerabilities in trusted aplications which means no matter the OS, the computer will be infected. PHP exploits, that kind of stuff.

Sure it the internet can be destroyed. We just need a solar quasar thing - that would fuck up everything though.

Are you thinking of a Gamma Ray Burst? Quasars are something different.