The silent Attack! In the web war there will be no weapons and no one will die! During a web war, outside everything will be quiet. The border guards will report no incursions, and the airspace has not been violated. But they were under attack by a rogue computer network. The attacks were aimed at the essential electronic infrastructure of a country.
The entire world is fully interconnected through internet and most communication’s depends on some type of Network. All networks are computer controlled. For eg. Our telephone network! Today everything is controlled over internet, traffic control is regulated through cctv’s connected to the network, electricity distribution controlled over the network. What more to say even national securities like defense, aerospace are all controlled using networks.
So I hope you get an idea of the importance of network in a country. All borders of a country will be highly secured by Army. Navy or whoever it may be… The least protected border of a country is the internet! There is no physical border for the internet for each country. But each country’s network can be identified uniquely in several ways by identifying the URL to check any extensions like .in , .sg etc.. A URL contained .in will surely an Indian website. The entire government website will follow the country extension in their official URL address and also the .gov extension. Another way is to identify is to trace the location of the server. So in this way each country have a unique virtual border for their networks.
In that way one can break down the entire country’s network. What if all the bank, news and govt. websites networks were down for a few days?? What is someone hack into airspace network? what if ATM's, police communication network all were down??What if someone hack into electricity distribution network? Whole country will be in chaos for at least a day!
Yes it is possible the simple way to down a website is to overload the server. That means every web server have a capacity to response for the request. i.e the number of simultaneous users have a limit. If a webserver have a capacity of 1lakh simultaneous users and if the server overfloods the amount means the server will crash! The allocated bandwidth to the server and website will be overflooded and thus the sites would become inaccessible. To overload a website is very simple for an experienced programmer as he will write a program that sends a few thousands of request simultaneously instead of a single request. The primary weapon was the "ping" attack, a simple request for a response from a webserver, repeated hundreds of times per second.When deployed by massess of attackers, the "pings" could overwhelm a server. Most times this method is used to test web servers to analyze the capacity of the server. What if this method utilized in the wrong way? Hackers can use war dialing to down a telephone network, which will initiate a large amount of anonymous calls and overload the telephone network.
If hackers are able to access those highly secured networks means it will have a higher impact than putting an atom bomb. The whole country cannot communicate by hacking the telecom and internet networks, the country will be in dark if they can access the electricity distribution network, the whole country will face traffic blocks and accidents if they access to traffic network and so on…Whoever behind this type of assault was sophisticated, fast and intelligent.
This type of attack is known as a botnet. Security tools do not inspect data downloaded through browsers - a loophole that attackers can exploit. A piece of malicious code has been added to the page you are viewing by the hackers. This uploads software onto your computer via your browser, turning it into a "zombie" PC under the remote control of a malicious user. As a result of this loophole, PCs are increasingly becoming infected with "bot" software, creating networks of zombie computers, or botnets. Bots first establish a link to a remote "botmaster" before probing your computer for email addresses and personal data, and even logging your keystrokes, and attackers send programs to flood designated internet address witha variety of useless network-clogging data.
As firewalls allow free passage to code or programs downloaded through the browser, the bot is able to install itself on the PC. Anti-virus software kicks in at this point, but some bots avoid detection by immediately disabling it. Once a computer has become infected with the malicious software, the zombie periodically connects to a web server controlled by the botmaster to receive instructions and download more software. Botnets themselves are also evolving. Most existing bots are vulnerable because they receive their instructions via an internet relay chat (IRC) server, a simple communication system. Botmasters distribute new bots programmed to establish contact with one of a group of operating zombies. Once contact is made, the P2P network relays information to the botmaster, who can link to the network through any zombie. In this way, even if security professionals trap a bot, they would have no way of identifying the botmaster.
Attacking a country’s network will have a huge impact on all the people in the country. Attack can be vary time by time like denial of service attacks and sending spam to botnets and zombies. Attackers can squeeze the entire country's badwidth capacity.
There is a real incident of Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe. To read more about that web war in Estonia visit this link : http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia
So next time when you try to browse internet and nothing comes means maybe your country’s network is under attack… but not always… before coming to this conclusion make sure you paid last month internet bill…!
Source : wired News, Readers Digest
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