Although I had a rough idea of
what’s detailed below I really didn’t know all the fine points of the internet
structure, and what I did know was romantically distorted by William Gibson’s
cyberspace, Al Gore’s information super highway, and my fanciful own concept of
an hallucinatory Interzone electronic souk. Thus, when the flowing shows up
from our pals at Delancey Place, I figured I should post it if only to marshal
my own grasp of the facts, while I'm trying to figure a way to bring the international banking system to its knees.
"From its inception as a U.S. military funded project in the 1960s, the Internet was designed to
solve a particular problem above all else: to ensure the continuity of
communications in the face of disaster. Military leaders at the time were
concerned that a preemptive nuclear attack by the Soviets on U.S.
telecommunications hubs could disrupt the chain of command -- and that their
own counterstrike orders might never make it from their command bunkers to
their intended recipients in the missile silos of North Dakota. So they asked
the Internet's original engineers to design a system that could sense and
automatically divert traffic around the inevitable equipment failures that
would accompany any such attack. "The Internet achieves this feat in a
simple yet ingenious way: It breaks up every email, web page, and video we
transmit into packets of information and forwards them through a labyrinthine
network of routers -- specialized network computers that are typically
redundantly connected to more than one other node on the network. Each router
contains a regularly updated routing table, similar to a local train schedule.
When a packet of data arrives at a router, this table is consulted and the
packet is forwarded in the general direction of its destination. If the best
pathway is blocked, congested, or damaged, the routing table is updated accordingly
and the packet is diverted along an alternative pathway, where it will meet
the next router in its journey, and the process will repeat. A packet
containing a typical web search may traverse dozens of Internet routers and
links -- and be diverted away from multiple congestion points or offline
computers -- on the seemingly instantaneous trip between your computer and your
favorite website. The highly distributed nature of the routing system ensures
that if a malicious hacker were to disrupt a single, randomly chosen computer
on the Internet, or even physically blow it up, the network itself would be
unlikely to be affected. The routing tables of nearby routers would simply be
updated and would send network traffic around the damaged machine. In this way,
it's designed to be robust in the face of the anticipated threat of equipment
failure. However, the modern Internet is extremely vulnerable to a form of
attack that was unanticipated when it was first invented: the malicious
exploitation of the network's open architecture -- not to route around damage,
but to engorge it with extra, useless information. This is what Internet
spammers, computer worms and viruses, botnets, and distributed denial of
service attacks do: They flood the network with empty packets of information,
often from multiple sources at once. These deluges hijack otherwise beneficial
features of the network to congest the system and bring a particular computer,
central hub, or even the whole network to a standstill. – Why Things Bounce Back – Andrew
Zolli & Ann Marie Healy (Free Press)
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