Mediaboss Marketing

26 March 2012 Last updated at 19:53 ET By Prof Alan Woodward Department of Computing, University of Surrey

A recent threat, purportedly from the hacker group Anonymous, stated boldly that its members would stop the internet on 31 March.

The term "Operation Blackout" was coined and it caused much discussion in all the usual forums.

Those issuing the threat even stated how they would do it. They claimed they could disable the Domain Name Service (known by engineers as the DNS) and that would stop the internet. How so?

The Domain Name Service is what converts the web addresses you type into your browser (such as http://www.bbc.co.uk) into what the internet actually uses: IP addresses (something like 212.58.244.66).

It is essentially the phone book for the internet. If you could prevent access to the phone book then you would effectively render the web useless.

The theory behind the proposed attack is based on the fact that the Domain Name Service is a tree structure: it starts with 13 servers at the top level and each of those talks to the next level down, which then pass it on to a further level down, and so on.

When a change is made at the top level it is copied out across the net so that when you look up what is effectively your local copy of the phone book, it takes you to the correct place.

If somehow one could prevent some or all of the 13 top level members of the DNS from working, specifically from communicating with others, then this would disrupt the remainder of the tree, and very quickly no-one would be able to use the addresses that we all typically know.

When the threat was made, it did cause some concern as the would-be hackers correctly identified the locations of the top level systems.

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Decapitating the internet