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BRINGING DOWN THE WEB

Brian Grainger

It would seem someone is trying to attack the very structure of the World Wide Web.

The Internet was set up as a communication network by the American Defence organisation DARPA. The prime philosophy was that it would not be compromised by a single computer. Should a computer go down the message finds another path via the connected network, so that a message to a next door neighbour may go via the opposite side of the world if necessary.

In those early days you communicated by knowing the Internet Protocol, (IP), address of the recipient. This was the four numbers separated by dots such as 123.456.789.123

When the World Wide Web came into being it was more useful to give a reasonable mnemonic rather than the IP address and the Universal Resource Locator, URL, was born. This is the familiar www.icpug.org.uk

Well, in October there was a distributed denial of service attack directed at the Domain Name System, DNS, servers. These convert the requested URL into the IP address and are crucial to use of the World Wide Web. There is more than one DNS server and for this reason no one noticed the World Wide Web fall over.

This last week another denial of service attack was made against UltraDNS. They maintain the new .info domain.

I cannot help feeling that hitting such targets is not the work of the so called script kiddies. They are getting at the core of the World Wide Web and should they be successful would cause an awful lot of damage.

Are you prepared for the day when the World Wide Web disappears?

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