From the Internet’s heart, Anonymous stabs at thee.

As we all know the hacktivist collective Anonymous released a threat to darken the Internet on March 31^st by attacking the Domain Name Service root servers, according to a post on Pastebin from February. Further agitation from various sources on the Internet shows that at least the media is preparing to watch what happens.

The Pastebin manifesto outlines a daring plan to strike at the DNS root servers with a distributed-denial of service attack:

By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a  domain name look-up, thus, disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web. Anybody entering “http://www.google.com” or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is, close enough. Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to ‘kill’ the Internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most.

While some ISPs uses DNS caching, most are configured to use a low expire time for the cache, thus not being a valid failover solution in the case the root servers are down. It is mostly used for speed, not redundancy.

Why are they doing this?

To protest SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved  bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of  sheer sadistic fun, On March 31, anonymous will shut the Internet down.

Anonymous has been on the front lines of a multitude of projects, including this Operation Blackout, that strike back directly at people and entities that stifle free speech and muzzle freedom of expression. So this feels like the sort of activity that the collective might get behind—except for the part where it muzzles themselves.

Although the sheer show of force and capability would be in the same vein as LulzSec—proving to the world that they’re not as safe or stable as they believe they are.

There are a lot of reasons why the Internet is susceptible to having the DNS root severs taken offline (listed in the manifesto) but for a DDoS attack to take them offline it would take the effort of hundreds of thousands of computers. Some experts believe that while it might be possible, in fact some of these vulnerabilities do exist, others find the outcome likely to be a flunk:

As menacing and convincing as that may sound, experts say that taking down the worldwide web wouldn’t be a walk in the park. Rod Rasmussen, president and chief technology officer of security firm IID, pointed out that root operators are already aware of this threat, and it’s been there for some time. Previous attack has only incurred it minimal negative effects. Errata Security CEO Robert Graham also said that it’s virtually impossible to take down all of the Internet’s servers for significant periods.

People have come to believe in all likelihood  this is either a troll or a hoax by another element claiming the mantle of the Anonymous collective but little has surfaced to deny it across the culture. Since the expenditure would be difficult to actually take out the root servers and it cuts directly across the bow of the usual moralistic concerns of the collective hacker culture, it seems like they would have difficulty recruiting enough people to try this.

However, just in case, we’re reporting it today, March 30^th.

So, Saturday tomorrow you discover your Internet running slowly (or not at all) and you wonder what’s going on…

At least now you’ve been warned.