Only one main interface to the Internet???

Very interesting article about a potential plot to disrupt Britain's Internet access...One item that jumps out at me:

Raids by Metropolitan Police detectives found computer files indicating that terrorist suspects had targeted a high-security Internet "hub" in London that handles most of the Internet information that passes in and out of Britain, including London's businesses and stock exchange, the Sunday Times said.

The first question that comes to mind...is "Why does Britain have only one main hub to handle the majority of their Internet traffic?

This flies against the security principle of redundant systems.

Chalmer

Denial of Service Attacks on Internet Servers...

The Domain Name Servers that support the Internet were subjected to a major Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, earlier this week. Domain Name Servers translate domain names (such as www.google.com) into IP addresses that computers can recognize. The servers were flooded with bogus traffic that was intended to prevent legitimate traffic from reaching the servers, thus denying legitimate users from accessing the services they desire.

In this case, the attack was not overly successful, partly due to the redundancies in place to protect the servers. The graph shows "dropped queries" or traffic that did not make it to the 13 servers that form the backbone of the Internet. Red means >90% of traffic was dropped to a particular server. In this attack, only two of the servers were significantly interrupted.

This is not the first time such an attack has been attempted. For more information on DoS, take a look at my presentation (pdf) on a similar attack that occurred in 2002.

The graph comes from RIPE.

Chalmer