What Would It Take to Shut Down the Entire Internet?

Gizmodo.com, a design, technology, science and science fiction website, asked cybersecurity experts how exactly one would go about shutting down the entire internet. Dr. Kevin Butler, associate professor of Computer and Information Science and Engineering and associate director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research at the University of Florida, shared his thoughts.

“Probably the most important protocol to assure the continued operation of the internet, the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, is relatively obscure. BGP is the routing protocol that determines how IP packets move between networks at the granularity of organizations, or “autonomous systems” (ASes). Internet Service Providers have an AS (for example, Comcast is AS7922, AT&T is AS7018) and if you work for a large company that multi-homes their internet connection, there’s a chance they have an AS number as well,” he said.

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