(Please note: Neither I nor HotWired suggest that you actually attempt any of these means of sabotaging the Internet, nor do we condone any such attempts; we merely offer these as frightening - and funny - examples of how vulnerable the information infrastructure we rely on really is.)

Domain name system attacks

DNS is at once vital to today's Internet and poorly designed. Crash it, and you leave the Internet in shambles.

1. Disrupt the domain name system by uploading a bogus database to the root domain servers. (Network Solutions already demonstrated this one.)

2. Flood prominent nameservers with requests from all over the Internet.

3. Mount host attacks against the machines on which the name servers are running.

4. Find a bug in the DNS server that makes the program crash when provided with bogus input. (This happens about once a week at my ISP for no apparent reason, so there definitely is a bug.) Exploit continuously.

5. Find a bug in the Microsoft Windows 95 DNS client that causes the computer to format its hard drive when resolving a particular URL. Publish that URL.

6. Falsify the DNS entries for a major WWW server, like AltaVista, so that people trying to reach these machines are redirected to the DNS port on the root servers. Ouch!

7. Buy 10 backhoes.