Europe subject to Cyber shutdown

European Union Committee:
Protecting Europe against large-scale cyber-attack  HL 68

large-scale cyber-attacks: ( Short sighted and misleading. G ) Conclusion: 22.  We asked all our witnesses for their views on whether the Internet was resilient to attack, since this is a prominent concern of the Commission Communication. They were unanimous that it was highly resilient. Mr Ilias Chantzos, the Director of Government Relations at Symantec UK Ltd, part of an American multi-national company which is one of the world leaders in information security, went so far as to say: "…the Internet is probably one of the most resilient networks that has ever been built. I would argue that the Internet has been designed to withstand a nuclear war" (Q 144). 23.  Professor Jon Crowcroft, Marconi Professor of Communications Systems at Cambridge University, explained the reason for its resilience: "The Internet is a network of networks, and its management is to a very high degree decentralised. This is one of its greatest strengths in resisting attacks. It is hard to find specific weak points, and rare that any particular failure will lead to widespread problems … Terrorists and other enemy organisations are themselves organised in decentralised ways. Asymmetric warfare works for them because their targets are centralised and obvious. The net is one infrastructure which resists this, and should be understood to be more robust as a result of this" (p 124). The Government took the same view in their written evidence: "The Internet is inherently resilient due to diverse network routes, robust network designs, a variety of network providers and the use of different makes of network equipment." With regard to the position of the United Kingdom, their view was that "It is highly unlikely that the UK could be 'cut off' from the Internet by remote electronic attack or technical failure" (p 1). 28.  We are conscious that cyber-attacks, or natural or man-made disasters, can cause acute disruption to the Internet in the short term. However we believe that the United Kingdom is reasonably well placed to cope with such disruptions. SOURCE: They acknowledge the threat but miss the scope of the problem. They discuss the Estoania cyber attack AND that it was caused by a few thousand PCs, and do not even discuss the threat posed by Cornfliker, with millions of bots. They miss the possibility of someone taking over cornfliker and launching a truly massive DDOS attack against not Europe or England, but all 13 Internet Nodes at one time. They miss the possibility of something the size of cornfliker knocking down the WWW every time they try to bring it back up. I was amazed to see Mr Ilias Chantzos, the Director of Government Relations at Symantec UK Ltd, part of an American multi-national company which is one of the world leaders in information security, missed the scope and source, its potential and the vectors involved. It was most disappointing. Internet Anthropologist Think Tank has been warning about this problem since 2007. Internet Anthropologist Think Tank: CYBERWARS's Pearl Harbour My Cyber attack on USA. Asterisk. EU and England are not immune. Gerald Internet Anthropologist Tactical Internet Systems analyst. .