Our plan for world domination: take down the internet

How to destroy the world. Is it possible to take down the internet?

We have been warning for a long time: Pandora FMS will control the world. We have given time to world governments to prepare, to North American villagers to prepare their bunker, for sects to draw their banners with “THE END IS NEAR”. And it is, it is indeed. Today, in our blog we reveal the secret plans of this company to overthrow the institutions and rule the world, then you will say that we did not warn you. Get ready, run to hide, children and gentle pets first, because the time has come: Is it possible to take down the internet?

That is the key to everything: Is it possible to take down the internet? For years, in the underground facilities of our offices, scattered across all continents, Pandora FMS has secretly worked to create an evil robot with an evil appearance that will execute even more evil plans. Its super intelligence, unattainable for any other desktop on the market, will help us take what belongs to us from this wasteland called earth and make it ours.

That is why today, on our blog (soon the only existing one) we have the exquisite pleasure to introduce you to Pandorinator RDM (Radical Destructive Mindset), the superior and ominous AI created by our company to help us in the work of crowning ourselves as the sovereigns of the world.

“Damn! Is it possible to take down the Internet, Pandorinator?! “

Pandora FMS: Good afternoon and welcome, Pandorinator.
Pandorinator RDM: Good afternoon everyone! Thank you for inviting me to this talk/colloquium at the end of the world.

Was it hard to get here with that alloy of platinum and gold that you have as armor?

Not at all. I have to get used to moving in it, otherwise one becomes paralyzed and does not come out of its hidden lair. In addition, it is a pleasure to wear it. Touch it, touch it! Don’t be shy! and watch it shine! Nor the roar of a thousand yellow suns at 12 noon radiating with their flames in summer equals it.

Let’s get to the point, Pandora FMS has always wanted to take control of the world, in fact that is why we created you, to advise us. With that said, Pandorinator, what do you recommend?

Well, a global pandemic, which is pretty trendy right now, confronting two great powers such as China and the USA, or, look, even easier, to take down the Internet.

Damn it! Is it possible to take down the Internet, Pandorinator?!

Of course it is, and I say that as an Artificial Intelligence expert on the subject of generating chaos. You only need to know inside out the critical infrastructure elements that make the Internet work.

What are these possible attack vectors?

Look, do you have a notebook there or something? Take note:

• Specific services (web, mail, etc)

Through distributed service denial attacks, it is possible to “take down” services such as websites, applications and others. There are mechanisms to protect against these attacks (such as CDN) and today there are dozens of attacks of this kind daily, massive, but they are quickly mitigated and usually affect specific services (a company’s website) or the Internet as a whole. They often work like an extortion attack (either you pay or we take down your app). Thug life.

• CDN

Basically they are large cache systems for publishing content, which allow Internet traffic to go smoothly. Without them, it would be much more expensive and slow to access all kinds of content, from images to text. All major media use CDNs.

The failure of a CDN can cause partial Internet blindness, cutting off access to large media simultaneously as it happened with the failure of Fastly in June 2021. There are many other CDNs and if they failed, that would mean the blackout of hundreds of thousands of websites of all kinds. The failure of a CDN only causes temporary problems (minutes/hours) in any case.

• Domain Name System (DNS)

DNS is one of the most critical parts of the global Internet infrastructure. The downfall of all the world’s root DNS, as we know it, would truly spell chaos. There are 13 root (main) DNS servers spread across the world. They are hosted by organizations such as NASA, Verisign, the University of Maryland, or the US Army Research Laboratory. To sum it up… tough guys.

If the 13 nodes fail, although there are hundreds of thousands of secondary replicas around the world, it would be necessary to coordinate the recovery, which would lead to partial chaos all over the network. This has never happened precisely because of the security measures and the original design. But that’s what Pandora FMS and I are here for, right?

• Cloud (Amazon, Azure)

Due to the intense concentration of many online services in public clouds such as Amazon or Azure, if one of them fails, that would mean all types of services not working anymore immediately. BOOM! Both AWS and Azure have different geographies to distribute the impact, but in the event of a physical destruction of one of their large data centers, the impact would be significant. Some premium services include automatic geographic high availability, but not all services can afford it. If the AWS data center in Ireland were destroyed by fire, tens of thousands of services would be affected for a long time.

Something similar, but on a smaller scale, happened when part of the data center of OVH, one of the largest European MSPs, got burned. Thousands of customers could not continue operating and lost data, since the backup in a different physical location was an optional service.

• Connectivity

I know what you have in mind. A simple mind like yours might think that the simple cut of a submarine cable could blind an entire country, but the truth is that the Internet was originally designed to avoid such situations. The Internet has millions of interconnections that can be reordered automatically in case of failure of one of them to redirect traffic through the connections that are still operational.

• Worms and Malware

A worm is a malware that is exponentially infected through the network and that can cause a collapse due to its massive use to try to replicate itself. In 1988, still at the dawn of the Internet, when technology and security were not yet very advanced, the Morris worm almost completely collapsed the Internet. Today a worm could collapse geographic sections of the Internet (such as a region) for a short time, but coordinating a massive attack is really complex to carry out without a large organization. Although, well, we could try…

It’s incredible everything you have in that quantum stubborn head we made for you, but I’m running out of pages to take note, Pandorinator RDM, could you give us any conclusions on how it is possible to bring down the Internet?

My, my, thanks for the compliment, Creator. I’ll give you your succinct conclusion: The Internet is designed for failure, so that we can lose services, but never leave the network inoperative at all. It is designed to be resilient and survive nuclear catastrophes that physically volatilize part of its infrastructure. The Internet is capable of regenerating its basic infrastructure (the routes that interconnect the nodes that make up the network) and the services that operate on them have their own ways of protecting and rebuilding themselves.

The only way we have to “turn off” the Internet is through a massive electromagnetic pulse that affects the entire planet or a massive Solar Storm. In both cases, the Internet crash would be the least of our problems.

And, listen, do you have a way to generate one of those massive electromagnetic pulses?

Me? Pay more attention! Who do you think you’re talking to? OF COURSE I HAVE! Right under this compartment, see? Even in the form of a red button.

Let’s see, let’s see…

How long will the planet as we know it last? Will Pandora FMS and Pandorinator RDM finally carry out their plans for world domination? You just have to stay tuned with our blog, our social media, and if Wi-Fi reaches you, because as the most cautious sect smokers announce: “THE END IS NEAR”.

From Linkedin to Twitter not forgetting Facebook. We even have a YouTube channel , and with the best storytellers. Ah well, we also have a new Instagram channel ! Follow our account, we still have a long way to go to match that of Billie Eilish.