Homeland Security & the British Govt are looking into this. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=716&e=7&u=/ap/20040420/ap_on_hi_te/internet_threat

People have claimed for a long time they can bring down the internet but I doubt it will happen. If it does it will be amusing to me. Remember Y2k? That was 4yrs ago and here we are today and nothing happened. There will always be flaws and issues and the risk will always be there that something might/can happen. Hell it would be nice if the internet dropped offline for a day or so. At least I could then have a few days off of work :) KTTD No, I will not fix your computer

Lol, Kevin, I hear ya. Sure, it's very possible to bring it down. After all, the internet is merely a lot of computers, which are of course subject to failures, hacking, and viruses. It would probably be a hefty task, but it's certainly not rocket science. It is definately a real threat that can't be laughed at. After all, that may cause more damage in the long term than a physical attack. Just my two cents.

The Internet was originally designed as a fault-tolerant communications network for the Department of Defense. As it's currently implemented, the Internet would be virtually impossible to "take out" because it has no weak points. The specific vulnerability linked to probably isn't much of a universal threat, but even if it were such a "weak point," but consider the logistics involved in DOSing the entire Internet. If I have thousands of zombie machines distributed all around the world, as I begin cutting segments, I cut some of my zombies off from the rest of the Internet, rendering them unable to attack. To save links for the zombies, I would have to preserve major telecom infrastructure. If some links are still present, IP works its magic and routes around my DOSing, just as it was designed to do in the case of a cold-war-era nuclear attack, for example. Another thing to consider is that this particular exploit should have been obvious to anyone with sufficient knowledge of TCP.