It's an interesting theory. I can't think of a more efficient way of denying people internet access than hacking the root DNS servers and then propagating blank or incorrect records to the millions of other private DNS servers.
Though efficient, it wouldn't be perfect. For those of you who aren't familiar with how DNS works, taking down DNS would be akin to taking away google maps from someone who doesn't know how to get anywhere in their car. The roads and places still exist, the direction to them are just unavailable.
However, as the article rightly states, a well populated local host file with key sites or a private DNS server that's set to read-only would be an effective solution, but only a tiny minority would have them.
A more foolproof method would be for the attackers to somehow disable the internet backbone. This would be impossible for even highly technical people to overcome, although far more difficult to pull off since the backbone is quite large these days with ostensibly no single points of failure. It would expect it to take considerable resources to disable the backbone.
More broadly, I do find the idea that "ten days of darkness/darnkess" means a global internet outage to be intriguing. There is certainly considerable logic to the theory.
It's an interesting theory. I can't think of a more efficient way of denying people internet access than hacking the root DNS servers and then propagating blank or incorrect records to the millions of other private DNS servers.
Though efficient, it wouldn't be perfect. For those of you who aren't familiar with how DNS works, taking down DNS would be akin to taking away google maps from someone who doesn't know how to get anywhere in their car. The roads and places still exist, the direction to them are just unavailable.
However, as the article rightly states, a well populated local host file with key sites or a private DNS server that's set to read-only would be an effective solution, but only a tiny minority would have them.
A more foolproof method would be for the attackers to somehow disable the internet backbone. This would be impossible for even highly technical people to overcome, although far more difficult to pull off since the backbone is quite large these days with ostensibly no single points of failure. It would expect it to take considerable resources to disable the backbone.
More broadly, I do find the idea that "ten days of darkness/darnkess" means a global internet outage to be intriguing. There is certainly considerable logic to the theory.