How To (not) Break The Internet

So there I was, sitting at my computer in my PJ's on a bright Sunday morning. My blinds are open and a cool breeze wafts in carrying the smell of sea water from the bay not too far from my apartment. It's early enough that there isn't a lot of traffic flowing below my window. It's calm, peaceful, and the perfect time for me to read the news with my morning cup of coffee. My overly powerful computer lights up with a flash of blue as the monitor casually displays it's branding before reaching the logon page. The routine speed-typing of my password is stalled by something that catches my eye in the corner of the screen. A little red X on a small graphic of a computer monitor in the bottom right corner. This little troublesome symbol means one thing, I get to play troubleshooter before I get back to my relaxing. I take another sip of my coffee and hover over the icon as if it's going to tell me something I don't already know. "No internet connection" flashes on screen for a split second as my gaze darts to my router sitting to my left. Little blue and green lights flash on and off as it attempts to do it's job with no luck. I glance over the cabling organized perfectly and untouched, checking to see if somehow something came unplugged. I run a few more tests and can tell that there is no flow of data coming from my wall outlet.

Sunday morning network outage? Sounds like a job for a costumer support rep from my local ISP. At the very least they can tell me the network status for my area. I haven't had enough coffee for this conversation and start grinding more beans as I wait on hold. A soft spoken representative answers the phone with their scripted ramble politely asking me for my account number. We back and forth through the conversation before they ask me how they can assist me today. I ask them politely if there is an outage reported in my area since there is no traffic reaching my modem. They ask a few more clarifying questions and determine that the best course of action is to run a test on my modem. Now, I do realize they are just running through a troubleshooting script so I tell them that won't work since the modem isn't receiving ANY traffic. They insist that this is the best course of action and do it anyways only to determine that there isn't any traffic going to my modem and that there is a possible outage in my area. They log in the ticket and tell me that it may be 3-4 hours before service can be restored depending on how occupied the techs are. I say goodbye, hang up the phone and take my dog for a walk.

Want to know what the issue was? The night before a tech for the ISP had accidentally unplugged the fiber connection to my building while doing some other maintenance. Apparently they unplugged it by accident while upgrading some equipment for a business on the ground floor and just never plugged in back in. Oops?

One cable. One little plug wiped out the connection to a whole building which included over 100 people. With one casual pull of a cable my little web of the ever expansive internet went dark for almost 8 hours. Now this is a small occurrence that tends to happen all the time. Sometimes it's some construction that knocked out the fiber line down the road. Sometimes it's some hardware that went bad and stopped working. Other times, it's just a simple unplugged cable.

It's a bummer for this to happen, but at this scale it's probably not the end of the world. Most people can get along just fine without internet for at least a few hours. In fact most people could probably benefit from getting unplugged from the web for a bit. What is really crazy is when this happens on a scale that wipes out the connection to most of the city, or state, or country!!

Like always with these topics, I want to teach you something about computers before I get into the meat of the article. What am I going to teach you today? Gee golly am I just tickled you asked me that, random internet reader. I'm going to teach you how the internet works! I'm going to do so by first asking you to go check your mail. No, no, not your email. Go out and check that box at the end of your driveway with the pieces of folded up paper inside it. That mail. Go on, I'll wait...

You back? great. Do me a favor and take a look at the address in the top of the envelope and check out where it came from. Probably from somewhere far away right? Right in the center there is your address, correct? Perfect. Each piece of mail needs one of these to be sent out right? It needs to know where it's going and where it came from. That way it can be delivered to the correct location but also give you, the recipient, the ability to reply if you so choose. You take out a pen and paper and write some words down on a piece of paper, stick it in an envelope, flip the to and from addresses, and send it off to it's destination. Assuming nothing happens to it in transit, and the state of the world is in a place where the transit system isn't being starved and strangled by a rope made out of misconception and misinformation, your letter should arrive at it's destination in no time! There is obviously a lot more to it than that but essentially this is how the internet works too. Let's break it down in slight more technical terms. Don't worry I'll be gentle.

Your computer wants to get some specific information from a website out on the internet. First thing it will do is take the request and pack it inside of an envelope and stamp its name and address on it. It then sends this envelope to your home router to be sent out to its destination. Your router is kind of like a personal mail carrier/bouncer for all your computers at home. When you ask it to send out information, it knows exactly how to do so. If it doesn't know, it knows who to ask. It also keeps your computers safe by not telling the internet where each device is located within your house and how many there are. Think of is like a pizza delivery, the final destination of the pizza is the dining room, but all the delivery person knows is to deliver it to the front door. They don't know where the pizza is going inside the house, that's your job, it just knows that it goes to the front door. In the case of your router, it knows where to deliver the information, but it's not going to tell anyone on the outside where it is on the inside. The front door is all it needs to know.

So back to the mail carrier! As this envelope gets to the router and leaves your home, it gets handed off to a bigger mail carrier. This mail carrier is typically your internet service provider like Comcast, Century Link, Cox, or one of the others out there. They take your envelope and drive it along wires that cross many different other mail carriers who pass it to another and another, all of which have a map of their area and know how to pass along your envelope in the best way. Sometimes one route doesn't work correctly or is offline. In this case all the mail carriers talk to each other and find a new path. These mail carriers are constantly talking to each other, figuring out the best path and adjusting based on what path is currently up and running. They determine this a few different ways. They can talk to each other in a big game of telephone but for some of the bigger intersections, it needs a bit of human intervention to configure the paths.

Eventually, after your envelope reaches it's destination, the website opens up the envelope and sees your request for information. If you have the right access, the website packs up your information, flips the to and from on the envelope and sends it back to you. This new envelope travels all the way back to where it lands in the hands of your router, who like we discussed earlier, knows how to get it to you.

This is of course a VERY broad outline but it should give you enough perspective.

You may be asking how, with this super complex system, the internet goes down. Well for the sake of this discussion we are going to skim over the idea of just unplugging things. Despite that happening to me and my apartment building, this generally doesn't happen like this. Redundancy and multiple paths prevent you from ever knowing if a cable was ever unplugged on this scale. I think that is a fairly obvious method of bringing down a small network but not quite the whole internet. So how does one bring down the massive beast that is the internet?

We confuse it.

How do we do that?

By telling it lies.

Remember those pathways with the mail carriers? We can actually feed them incorrect information. We can tell them the wrong destination, or that the destination is no longer there, or tell them it's there when it isn't any longer. In technical terms this is generally called DNS poisoning and is a method hackers can use to misdirect information, but it doesn't have to be hackers. These mail carriers can be fed the wrong information on accident from those pesky humans, which causes them to be confused and stop working correctly. This is like telling you the address for a Starbucks but in reality it's a Subway. See how this could be dangerous if someone wanted to do harm?

Another way we can break the internet is by lying about where each of those long pathways go. This is less about the specific locations and more about the routes themselves. Think of this as if someone went around the city and changed up all the traffic signage. Street names, directional pointers, highway exit numbers, all messed up. This would cause quite a bit of chaos don't you think? Streets would get clogged, highway exits would get backed up, major intersections would be overwhelmed with confused. It would be enough to, oh I don't know, shut down a city? This also brings down the internet. Tell the traffic controllers lies about where things are and nothing gets to where it needs to go, resulting in the internet not working.

So how does these situations happen. Unfortunately in the same way, feed the controllers of the internet the wrong information. Either on purpose or by accident, it doesn't matter, the internet won't work if it doesn't know how to direct the traffic to the correct place or where the places actually are.

Okay cool, so bigger question is why does this happen?

By being human. We humans aren't perfect by any means. We make mistakes and sometime act pretty carelessly. In our carelessness we tend to overlook details and forget to check our numbers. We aren't machines after all and sometimes we make mistakes when making a change to the systems that run the flow of information. Just like when that tech unplugged that cable in my apartment. They didn't mean to do that but it happens.

Unfortunately there is another way all this could happen and this way is not so forgivable.

This other way is by a person or a group of people who WANT to do harm. They attack and maliciously act in a way that disrupts the flow of information against the wants and desires of those who maintain the flow of information. This is very upsetting since in an age of information, the only way we survive together is by helping one anther understand more than what's in front of us. Making it so others don't have all the information, or in some cases, the wrong information on purpose is just as good as restricting their ability to live effectively in a connected world. The integrity and availability of information in today's world is what brings us together under the banner of what is true and moral. Which leads to the final way you bring down the internet...by not bringing it down at all.

How do you control a population? Violence? No, that will just make more violence. How you truly control a population is you feed them lies and make them feel alone in the world. You force them into believing that the rest of the world is actually out to get them. You make them believe that the only true source of information is from you. You tell them that all the information they read and see that doesn't come from you, the one in power, is a lie and false. You force those who share information openly to either spout your version of the truth, or you else you'll tell lies about them till the people no believe what they have to say. You change and manipulate the information till the truth is no longer known and all information is as good as useless. In this way, no one believes anything and everyone fights over what is true and what is not. You create chaos.

We live in a world where information is power, and the powerful have the ability to choose who has access to that information. But more than that, they also have the ability to choose what information you see. At the end of the day, cyber security is about protecting information. The pillars of cyber security are integrity, availability, and confidentiality. If you take away even one of those pillars, security fails. Bringing down the internet because of an unplugged wire restricts our availability to information, but changing and manipulating the information kills its integrity. To me that's just as bad, if not worse than no information at all.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy who enjoys technology so much he spends his Saturday writing about it for fun.