Robert Siciliano and other security experts discuss what would happen if the internet crashed globally. Modern life depends entirely on it, from power grids to financial systems, and even brief outages have caused real damage.
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What if an attack or technical collapse shut down the internet? Experts say it could happen.
We'd literally be living in the dark.
What's being done to prevent it? Tonight at 10.
It is such a huge part of our lives, it's hard to imagine getting by without it.
No, absolutely. The internet has made everything so much easier, but some say when it was created decades ago, it was never intended to be what it became. Tonight, Fox 25's Ted Daniels says that's why the web could be headed for a big crash.
The integrity of this In 1969, Nixon became president. The Beatles released Abbey Road. And the first transmission over the earliest version of the internet was recorded. Things have changed a lot in 40 years. What began as a connection between two university computers now rules the world. Just the thought of life offline is enough to send some off their rocker.
I wouldn't have a life after that.
Seriously, I would have no life.
I would be disconnected from the world. You wake up and you get your internet. If you have no, just like have nothing in your life.
Worldwide internet failure would mean faxes instead of emails, maps instead of GPS, cash instead of credit cards, and social networking would actually require face-to-face meetings.
Within 3 weeks, we'd be back to 1840.
Boston-based computer security expert Robert Siciliano paints a doomsday scenario.
The internet controls electricity, it controls running water, it controls commerce. We have become to rely on the internet in a way that if it was to cease to function today, life as we know it would cease to function.
It has been more than 20 years since the last major overhaul of the internet, and the core architecture hasn't really ever changed. Almost every day there are outages, some bigger than others. Last year, an explosion and fire at a large data center in Houston shut down thousands of websites. Hundreds of thousands Tens of thousands in the Middle East and India were knocked offline when several underwater telecom cables were damaged. And YouTube was unavailable for 2 hours when a Turkish telecom company mistakenly claimed their IP address. Is there a fear that there could ever be a widespread outage or failure?
Well, I think a lot of people who don't know how the internet is built under the hood We'll always have a fear that—
David Berlind of Newburyport is the Chief Content Officer and Editor-in-Chief of TechWeb. He says complete internet failure is not just unlikely, it's nearly impossible.
So we went from Newburyport to Groveland to Needham to Hartford.
The internet is a decentralized system of routers and networks owned and operated by many governmental and private organizations. He says even if there's an outage or problem in one area of the world, there are millions of other paths the information can travel.
Even if some part of the internet isn't functioning, it will reroute itself. It'd have to be an absolutely global catastrophe to bring the internet down.
Berlin also says the companies that provide internet service have a vested interest in maintaining the infrastructure, and advances are being made to increase capacity every day. As the internet celebrates its 40th anniversary
