14 DAY TRIAL // A Pastebin post, allegedly published a few days ago by members of Anonymous, reveals the hacktivists’ intentions to shut down the Internet on March 31 by going after “the 13 root DNS servers of the Internet.”
While many may argue that this is a hard to accomplish task, it seems as the plan is already laid out. A number of 13 IP addresses are listed, which allegedly belong to the 13 DNS servers.
The initiators of this attack, part of Operation Global Blackout, are aware of the fact that the Internet can’t be simply unplugged, but they’re confident that the sites to suffer as a result of this outage will draw enough attention to their cause.
“By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name lookup, thus, disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web,” the hackers write.
“Anybody entering ‘http://www.google.com’ or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is, close enough. Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to 'kill' the Internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most.”
The mastermind behind this operation claims he already compiled a Reflective DNS Amplification DDOS tool to be used in this attack.
“It is called an amplified because we can use small packets to generate large traffic. It is called reflective because we will not send the queries to the root name servers, instead, we will use a list of known vulnerable DNS servers which will attack the root servers for us.”
We have contacted some security experts hoping that they can provide some technical insight on this plan of action. Stay tuned to see if professionals find these claims plausible.