Germany Hit With Cyber Attack, Next One Could Completely Cripple The Internet

Germany was recently hit with a botched botnet attack, which took out almost 1 million routers used by customers of the telecommunication company, Deutsche Telekom. It would appear that the blackout was caused by hackers who wanted to use the routers as ammunition for the Mirai botnet tool, which is what caused several internet related incidents throughout the year.

Hundreds of thousands of customers of Deutsche found themselves unable to use their internet last Sunday, Reuters reports, and the company is blaming the outage on a failed router hijacking attempt. The attack only affected about 4.5 percent of the company’s total number of fixed-line consumers, but nearly 1 million routers used by the Mirai botnet would have been enough to cause a repeat of the last major internet shutdown.  

Fortunately, it would seem that those responsible for the attack failed in their attempt, with the internet outage being a more favorable outcome compared to the alternative. However, in light of new information, it would seem that the attempt on Germany is just one of numerous plans to implement a global movement to take over routers all over the world.

According to the German government, a worldwide campaign is currently underway to hijack millions upon millions of routers in order to add them to the Mirai botnet army. The information was released by the German Office for Information Security itself, which immediately merits attention from the global online community.

For some time now, the prospect of an internet attack massive enough to completely cripple the entire infrastructure of the World Wide Web has been weighing on the minds of tech giants and governments. In fact, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk previously warned that this could happen if an extremely advanced artificial intelligence was used.

Right now, the countries affected by the attacks range from Ireland to Brazil, sparking fears that absolutely no one is safe. The next incident could be just around the corner and there is a very real possibility of major damages.