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Cyber attack takes Liberia’s entire Internet down - expert comment
November 2016 by Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst at NSFOCUS
A cyber attack has knocked Liberia’s internet offline, as hackers targeted the nation’s infrastructure using the same method that shut down hundreds of the world’s most popular websites at the end of last month. Multiple attacks against Liberia’s internet infrastructure have intermittently taken the country’s websites offline over the course of a week.
Commenting on this, Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst at NSFOCUS, said "Researchers and analysts (like myself) have been warning organisations all over the world that this day would come, and now it’s here. Since the attacks on Spamhaus in early 2013 that exceeded 300Gbps, taking a country offline in a DDoS attack became more of a reality. Doing the math, a 1Tbps DDoS attack can fill 100 – 10Gbps pipes. Many smaller countries don’t have that much bandwidth serving their entire country.
Sabotaging parts of the “Internet” in the U.S. on election day is quite possible. However, polling machines in the U.S. are not directly connected to the Internet. Unfortunately, it’s still unclear if voter “identification systems” are. In some states, the voter ID must be checked before a voter can proceed. If those systems are connected to the Internet to gain access to a database of registered voters, and they were taken offline, then would-be voters could not be verified. What that would mean to the election process is anyone’s guess."
