[Mr. Robot]

So just to clarify, this is not obviously a real attack or anything like that - I just recently saw a world economic forum video where they "predicted" a "catastrophic" cyber 'event' in the next 2 years.

That got me thinking, What would be the worst things to happen?

As far as I am aware, these are the top 3.

1) A natural disaster/volcanic eruption/continental shift causes the undersea cable to be destroyed along the north of the north Atlantic ocean or bering sea.

2) Someone hacks into the ICANN DNS root server and redirects all traffic to whatever they want whenever they want (aka what feds should be doing to catch them baddies) or someone finds a way to use like negative value IPs to be first in the chain of DNS lookups.

3) A huge wave of bit flip capable cosmic rays shower down on Earth fucking with a bunch of tech, or someone reproducing a machine that can replicate this attack vector.


Any other ideas?

[Prawnster]

I remember hearing a funny (possibly not true n could just be hearsay - not researched) story bout sharks attacking the undersea cables providing internet to UK and posing a genuine threat to knocking out our entire internet 🤣🤣

So maybe the internet can be defeated by general physical attack from wildlife/"acts of god" hahaha.
I know it's not likely, but I'm whisky drunk n it made me chuckle to even think about the theory of this happening! 🤣✌

[Blazin]

Yeah, simple. Russia launches it's super EMP from space.

[Fuze]

1) A natural disaster/volcanic eruption/continental shift causes the undersea cable to be destroyed along the north of the north Atlantic ocean or bering sea.

I don't think this would do much to internet in local regions, just would not be able to access sites that are hosted overseas. Would be an impact but would not be internet destroying.

2) Someone hacks into the ICANN DNS root server and redirects all traffic to whatever they want whenever they want (aka what feds should be doing to catch them baddies) or someone finds a way to use like negative value IPs to be first in the chain of DNS lookups.

I don't know if this is something that could be done? Pretty sure the . root of DNS is not on a single server but maybe is distributed amongst T1 providers? I don't actually know how that is done, so I can only speculate.

3) A huge wave of bit flip capable cosmic rays shower down on Earth fucking with a bunch of tech, or someone reproducing a machine that can replicate this attack vector.

What kind of cosmic rays?

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To expand on my reply more though, I think there will be a 0 day that exploits weaknesses in the way BGP ASNs work to break BGP neighborship and bring networks offline.