March 31 is coming: will the world remain without Internet as Anonymous promised?

Nearly a month ago the whole world media was full of announcements about Anonymous hackers’ group which promised to close the Internet on March 31, this year.

As Times.am informed then the group posted a statement on Pastebin earlier which says that the group plans to attack 13 DNS servers that ensure URLs such as google.co.uk are translated into the IP addresses that host these websites.

As tomsguide.com writes this may be why LulzSec decided to rise from the ashes early, as by April 1 there probably won’t be internet to showcase its new hacking prowess.

According to the announcement spread by the group the action aims to protest SOPA, Wallstreet. “Our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun, On March 31, anonymous will shut the internet down”.

Anonymous believes if it can successfully take those root servers down for long enough, “DNS as we currently use it would cease to function, and the web would become at least temporarily inaccessible for most of its users”.

“So how will Anonymous nuke the internet?”, tomsguide.com asks. May be by attacking the 13 “root” DNS servers using a Reflective DNS Amplification DDoS tool? This compiled tool is based on AntiSec’s DHN and contains a few bug fixes, different DNS list/target support and is somewhat stripped down for speed.

“By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name lookup, thus, disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web. Anybody entering “http://www.google.com” or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is, close enough.”

Note that Anonymous didn’t announce how long the Internet would be unavailable, only that it could last mere hours, or extend out for days.

Of course this is not confirmed information and may just be a big pre-April Fool’s joke. It could also be purely fake and unrelated to Anonymous as seen with the supposed Anonymous operating system release weeks ago, although we haven’t seen any reports denying the impending attack.

“Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to ‘kill’ the internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most”, the hackers announced.