Hackers are working towards taking down the Internet
A group of hackers, likely sanctioned by China or Russia, is testing the defences of companies that run critical parts of the Internet.
That’s the warning from security expert Bruce Schneier, who said these companies have seen an increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against them.
Schneier said the companies provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work, and spoke to him on condition of anonymity.
He said the companies are seeing attacks that fit a certain profile: they target multiple attack vectors at once, they are larger and last longer than a normal attack, and they are more sophisticated.
Attacks would also continue from a higher point than they left off a week before, like someone looking for a point of failure.
“It doesn’t seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do,” said Schneier.
Profiling core infrastructure is common practice in espionage and intelligence gathering, but not common for companies, he added.
“It feels like a nation’s military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the US’s Cold War programme of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defence systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.”
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