What If... The INTERNET was DESTROYED? | Myths Debunked (Animation)

today almost all of us live online and the internet touches everything we depend on so it would be pretty horrifying if it all just stopped across the globe there are an estimated 4.4 billion Internet users spending on average 6 hours per day engaged in digital activity in the UK we check our smartphones every 12 minutes is one of the first things we do when we wake up and one of the last things we do at night collectively we're a bunch of internet addicts to get a scale of just how big the Internet's become before the end of this video more than 450 million messages will have been since on whatsapp 6.25 million people will have locked into Facebook and five thousand hours of video would have been uploaded to YouTube indeed the web created my job working on debunked and I'm not the only one it's estimated that the Internet has created 2.6 jobs for everyone it has caused to disappear its economic importance is massive by 2020 ecommerce alone will be worth more than four trillion dollars to the global economy driven by spending in places like China where more than 1 in 5 of all retail sales are made online remember in 1995 fewer than 1% of the world was online today society is dependent on it our power grids are connected by the Internet the global banking system needs it to move money around the world cell phone networks rely on its function public transport water supplies you name it almost everything is connected to the Internet in some way so what would happen if the internet suddenly appeared the world went offline and could it all be taken down by a single person I'm Stu this is the bunked and we're here to sort the troops from the myths and the facts from the misconceptions this video is made with the support of dashlane the only tool you need to stay safe online discover for free how much easier life can be and when you never forget another password for most of us shutting down the internet seems completely unthinkable but it actually happens more often than you think just on a local scale in June 2018 Algeria shut down internet access across the entire country for three hours every day to prevent cheating during school exams this anti cheating method has been used in other parts of Africa as well as areas of Asia according to a report by the global network initiative access to the web was deliberately disrupted more than 100 occasions in 2017 and not always to stop people getting grades they don't deserve the consequences of shutting down the net even for a brief window of time can be serious according to the author of the gni report yen right Zack shutting down digital communication often disproportionately harms marginalized and vulnerable groups cripples the local economy and creates cascades of chaos with consequences we cannot fully fathom the knock-on effect for the wider world isn't smaller either such disruptions are said to have cost the global economy 200 billion dollars between 2015 and 2016 obviously cheating on your exams is a pretty serious misdemeanor but in practice governments go offline during emergencies Egypt famously shut down internet access for almost a week in 2011 during the Arab Spring the UK already has laws allowing for the internet to be shut down in a major emergency and Russia reportedly has plans to develop an internet kill switch which would take the country offline in the event of a cyber crisis but these are examples of a single country going offline deliberately and for a short period of time what would happen if there was a global internet blackout that lasted weeks even months obviously and thankfully there hasn't happened because if it did things would go south pretty quickly the only credible post-internet divisions are all ties to civilizational collapse like global pandemics and nuclear catastrophes the hidden message in all of those scenarios is that if the only way to convincing the imaginal world without an Internet is to imagine a world without civilization then to a first approximation the Internet has become our civilization so in the first few days panic begins to sweep the world and people respond by stockpiling food it's not long before shelves are empty and restocking them went to be easy since stores use online inventory systems to keep track of supplies and all the replacements actually buying the food is also a challenge the global economy would have ground to a halt pretty quickly stock markets are closed and bank to bank transactions have ceased your card has stopped working and so have most ATMs since they're usually connected to the internet cash becomes unbelievably important let's hope you have a piggy bank after a week things are starting to get serious local power outages grow into large-scale blackouts as national power grids become imbalanced without the internet to coordinate them gas pipelines which need power and the internet also stopped working crime is starting to ramp up and the economy is descended into a barter system people start grouping together for protection smaller businesses have gone bust things are looking bleak by month's end fuel shortages are preventing food deliveries and riots are common especially around food distribution centers it's become a fight for survival after a year we're looking at the complete breakdown of society according to a particularly bleak prediction by the BBC science focus magazine around a billion people would have died from a combination of unrest cold and starvation the global economy would be back to 1930's levels for all that to happen though someone would need to take down the whole web and that won't be easy the Internet is designed to keep working even in the most extreme circumstances take a look at this map at first you might be mistaken for thinking it's something to do with the human brain but you'd be wrong it's actually a partial map of the internet from back in 2005 with each line essentially representing a connection within it what it also shows is just how decentralized the whole thing is let's say you and I download the same file from the internet that data could end up taking very different routes before it reaches us ultimately you might be able to take out one part of the internet but the rest will keep on trucking even in areas that were disrupted the information traveling through that section could potentially get rerouted and still reach its intended destination in other words the internet is a pretty tough nut to crack but it's not invulnerable take the physical backbone of the internet for example approximately 99% of all Internet traffic is pinged around the globe via underwater sea cables which are cheaper and faster thus sending data via satellites now you're probably assuming that there's loads of these cables given just how much data we're producing I mean the US alone uses over 2.6 million gigabytes of Internet data every minute surprisingly though and that doesn't translate into lots of cables at the end of 2017 there were 428 cables doing the heavy duty work of connecting our planet what isn't a surprise though is that those cables stretch out over an incredibly long distance coming in at 750 thousand miles combined that could loop the earth 30 times that means there's a lot of opportunities where you can cut though precious cables and cable cutting has happened before in 2008 several cables were cut in the Mediterranean and the Middle East the result was widespread internet chaos india's nationwide network suffered 60% disruption egypt got it worse with 70% approximately 75 million people were left with limited internet access across the region the damage was thought to have been caused by a ship dropping anchor plus there are only a few locations where these undersea cables wises out of the ocean to connect us here on land these hubs are also potential weak spots in the Internet's armor the cable hub in Miami for example handles around 90% of the Internet traffic between North America and Latin America if someone were to destroy it you'd be causing a lot of grief to millions of people even if you can't swim or don't want to leave the house you still might be able to bring about an Internet apocalypse most of you probably won't remember October 21st 2016 possibly because you are so bored as sites like Netflix Reddit and Spotify amongst others were down for many users in the US and Europe the huge outage of key sites was the result of a massive cyber attack on dine a company that provides domain name services which are pretty crucial to help we use the internet basically every time you type in a web address let's say WWE YouTube comm the domain name system translate that into the IP address of the server you're trying to access without it instead of having to remember youtube.com you'd have to type in something like this it doesn't exactly scream memorable not only that but without the DNS you'd have to remember those long strings of numbers for every website you wanted to use in other words take down the entire DNS and you make the Internet unusable for most people the attack on Dianne was what's known as a distributed denial of service attack where the company servers were effectively overwhelmed by fake information requests meaning everyday users like you and me couldn't get through but despite the impressive scale of the attack with users across the eastern part of the USA particularly affected the attack lasted just a day and it wasn't constant it came in a series of waves each only lasting a couple of hours but what if a cable cutting mad person decided to go rogue or a dedicated cyber criminal wanted to send a deluge of traffic to DNS services across the world could they take down the Internet and could they do it single-handedly let's imagine our villain is a really good swimmer then it might be possible for them to cut a cable or two in 2013 for example three men were arrested in Egypt after attempting to cut through an undersea internet cable their damaged it severely enough the Egyptian online services suffered a noticeable slowdown two years later someone simply went cable cutting by climbing down manholes in California and managed to slow down internet speeds across the state but here's the thing about cable cutting it happens fairly regularly and it's no big deal ships dropping anchor sharks and natural disasters have all damaged them in the past back in 2008 Stefan Beckett of tele Geography commented cable cuts happened on average once every three days while the submarine cable repair company global marine systems also noted that more than 50 repair operations took place in the Atlantic alone in 2007 they don't take long to fix either in 2018 when the attack country of Mauritania lost internet access thanks to a cut cable it only took 48 hours to rectify the problem nine other African countries were also hit but didn't go offline which shows how robust the system is and why you'd have to take out a lot of cables to make a real impact and even if by some miracle you and over 400 of your closest friends managed to cut all the cables at the same time that's only 99 percent of the Internet you'd still have the satellite based network left to deal with we'd have to get used to a 140 or pee on YouTube videos again but it wouldn't be a total internet Armageddon what about a huge distributed denial-of-service attack on DNS services one on a scale way bigger than the DynaTAC in theory a particularly skillful hacker group could infect and take over hundreds of thousands of computers or unsecured Internet of Things devices like Reuters DVD players or security cameras to create a network of machines under their control the so called botnet in theory you could create such a botnet single-handedly after all the botnet that was eventually used to dine was created by just three people armed with a similar army of zombie machines our super hacker could overwhelm key domain name services and effectively render the internet useless the scary thing is you may be getting closer to this than you imagined according to John Bowers co-author of a cybersecurity study by Harvard University released in 2018 the concentration of DNS services into a small number of hands exposes single points of failure that weren't present under the more distributed DNS paradigm of yesteryear that sounds more complicated than it really is basically what John is saying is that the number of companies providing crucial domain name services has gotten smaller and smaller which means you only have to take out a few key players to the internet one such key player is very sine which provides services for many top-level domains if you manage to overwhelm them and you make the Internet pretty much useless now you're probably thinking that I'm exaggerating but sadly not as computer security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level internet domains like dot-com and net if it goes down there's a global blackout of all websites and email addresses in the most common top-level domains in other words websites ending in calm or net plus many others would be unreachable unless you somehow managed to memorize all the IP addresses of all your favorite sites and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you haven't while the fact that companies like Verisign are facing increasing numbers of DDoS attacks which are only getting more complex and persistent is certainly not a good thing such attacks are not going to kill the internet after all a botnet needs the Internet to work in order to be effective in effect DDoS attacks like the one on dine are a pain in the ass with potentially huge consequences whether they don't represent a practical internet Armageddon as clear Budman CEO of Backblaze a cloud storage provider notes even the large scale attack against teens still only knocked out certain sites for certain people for certain amounts of time the internet will very much exist before during and after such an attack it might just be massively convenient to use for a while ultimately a single person could cause a lot of online havoc they might take down key service providers using a botnet they're unlikely to take down all key services simultaneously worldwide and for a sustained period they might even be able to cause an internet blackout in an entire country or region by cutting cables but they're not going to be able to cut all the cables quickly enough to bring down the entire web of course countries could mobilize their resources to cause internet destruction on a bigger and perhaps more permanent level but as for you and me well we'll probably have to think of alternative plans from becoming supervillains most of us have used the internet for over a decade or ever since it was born in this time we've all created hundreds of logins for different websites and nearly all of us are guilty of reusing the same passwords while the internet disappearing might not be something you should worry too much about keeping your online identity in control against the increasing numbers of website breaches and hacks is something you should be concerned about and thanks the dashlane you can actually do something about it you can keep all of your online data secure and never have to worry about your accounts getting hacked by using - claim it's the only tool you need to stay safe online featuring a robust password manager VPN and dark web monitoring - Lane will actively keep you safe and to for you with security alerts over 13 million users and 10,000 leading companies used dashlane and like us you can get it for free all you have to do is download - train via - Lane comm forward slash debunked and you'll have all the tools you need for a simpler safer life online plus as a special bonus - debunked viewers you can get 10% off of their premium service - which gives you access to their multi country VPN and more the support from partners like - 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Channel: Debunked

Views: 81,910

Rating: 4.8152332 out of 5

Keywords: apocalypse, how the internet works, map of the internet, delete the internet, how to survive, mythbusters, debunked, debunk, myth, fake news, urban legend, fact, lies taught, how to, what if, hacker, hacked, conspiracy, botnet, DDoS, What happens, destroyed, shutdown the Internet, kill switch, no internet, route leak, internet, web, delete, virus, largest, in a nutshell, www, kurzgesagt, blackout, take down the internet, end of the world, fallout, infographic, animation

Id: ZsL03YxGOQ0

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 23 2019