Researcher’s at the University of Minnesota have come up with a bot net attack that could theoretically take take a large portion of the internet. It is a scalable distributed denial of service attack that exploits the way routers send ouf BGP updates(border gateway protocol). It basically involves using the botnet to have send out a ton of BGP updates saying that a given router is dead, causing the other routers connected to it to have to recalculate the route for packets. As more and more routers are affected, the amount of computation each router has to do would sky rocket, causing each router to have more updates than it could handle. Apparently the attack is unlikely because the people malicious people with the technical knowledge to do it would be motivated by profit and have little interest in a DoS attack. Here’s the link to the article: link

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