Could a Virus Destroy the Internet?

The Internet is a vast network adapted to quickly recover from catastrophic outages in connectivity. Web-based content in data centres is a subject of procedures to contour itself around problematic areas and replicate it.

Yet, the internet is no more immune to threat to its health or safety. Here are a few:

Viruses.
Computer viruses are rogue programs that seek to access and hijack your computer, steal data without your consent, physically damage hardware and devices attached to it, and sabotage your web flow. They also endanger online services because they eat up RAM and make devices unresponsive.

Viruses get their way into computers through everything from emails and social media to updates. After inside, they make copies of themselves quickly, copying themselves and inserts copies into files or programmes – some even grow and transform with each copy, and lurk where similar copies are located to be indistinguishable from others.

A virus’s propagation stage could be triggered by the user or computer timers, like logic bombs that activate after multiple reboots (to hide its source). When turned on, they might show political, funny or suicidal content to you; collect passwords and account details; track keystrokes; or log keystrokes.

Worms make for good friends!
It is a type of malware that infects a system by spreading automatically via networks, steals data or builds backdoors to allow the hackers into the system.

The earliest worm, Creeper, was transmitted through the ARPANET by simply putting out a broadcast: “I’m the CREEPER: CAPTURE ME IF YOU DON’T LOSE. While it had a relatively modest effect, Creeper laid the groundwork for later more sophisticated malware.

Unlike viruses that depend on human intervention to spread, worms do it themselves – they take up bandwidth and space on hard drives, and slow down devices and computers as they move through.

Whether or not a worm is spreading will be a function of its architecture and the network it’s inside. While some use slow network protocols such as email to spread, others use faster networks such as TCP to search and infect more hosts faster.

Botnets is a network that distributes malware .It is a global network of linked objects, that send and receive information, which underpins economic and social innovation. But like all networks, it is not immune to attack. There’s a real possibility of malware infection that makes the computer enter into a botnet controlled by an anonymous hacker known as a “bot herder”; the malware can connect computers to other botnets controlled by another hacker known as a “bot herder” and in turn, they may get involved in illegal or malicious activities such as data theft, ransomware attacks on sites, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against websites.

Attackers lure computers to join their botnet gang by tricking them into downloading programs or snooping through web browsers and software. When entered into a botnet, it’s usually asleep until it’s instructed to take action by its commander – although mitigation can include monitoring programs that consume too much disk space or do something unusable and deleting the program or activity that might seem unusual.

Censorship means the practice of censoring, manipulating or restricting online content for any reason. Govts or private organisations can censor on their own, individuals can also censor for reasons of security or privacy

Regulations are incentivising companies to remove content that doesn’t conform with the free speech laws, which has prompted them to tighten controls on what constitutes and isn’t free speech. This “censorship creep” also makes the delineation of what is good free speech more difficult.

DNS tampering, IP blocking, keyword censorship and traffic censorship are ways to restrict use of a particular product or service on the internet. They might slow the internet and render browsing unreliable, or they might cease selling some products altogether – for example, China makes computers available with software that allows the state to change a list of sites that it banned at will, which has grave consequences for local businesses who might no longer have access to advertise online.