March 2, 2010 by Jenny Sanderson
Almost like when your electricity goes out and you have no idea what to do with yourself but stare at the lights willing it to come back on, the internet now has a similar effect on many households across the UK. For many of us if the internet is not working for more then 15 minutes we begin to panic and start to visualise a list of all the things that we won’t be able to do if the internet remains this way for much longer, it could be said that we are far too dependant on net.
This belief is shared by the UK government, a recent report by the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) has brought to light the fact that a cyber attack on the nations internet service could have a “catastrophic” effect. The report has warned that huge emphasis and reliance placed upon the internet may soon reach “a point of no return.”
It is feared that any interruption to our broadband service could potentially cause serious harm to our productivity, our well-being and our already down trodden economy.
The report goes onto say: “A successful cyber attack against public services would have a catastrophic impact on public confidence in the government, even if the actual damages caused by the attack were minimal.”
This is quite a scary outlook as experts predict that wars in future could become digital and fought by way of cyber attacks, although I am sure no access to Facebook would be less harmful then a nuclear attack.
In an effort to emulate the Terminator film as best as possible robot networks known as Botnets have been created, with a ‘Botnet’ whole legions of computers can be taken over by internet hackers with a single push of a button causing Denial of Service (DoS). Twitter and Facebook were attacked in this way in 2009 causing hours of problems.
With the hackers becoming even more proficient at covering their tracks it is getting increasingly more difficult for governments to track them down. This prompted the launch of CSOC last year, they are dedicated to finding out what is causing the attacks, where they may be coming from and how to stop them.
It is hard to figure out what is a scarier prospect, the idea of cyber war or the idea of a nation driven crazy without the use of the internet, either way it is a very real prospect that will hopefully never come to fruition.
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