BBC: US Physicists Reveal Previously Unknown Vulnerabilities in Internet
The British Broadcasting Company is reporting that U.S. physicists have documented previously unknown vulnerabilities in the continuity of the Internet. Scientists at Notre Dame demonstrated in simulations that attacks against only the top four percent of Internet nodes (according to the number of interconnections that they have access to) would result in terrible problems with packet loss.
Anyone who has servers that are co-located somewhere else in the United States already has some sense of how vulnerable the network is to a large scale loss of continuity. Even if you buy your access from a provider that own a great deal of backbone connectivity, you can find yourself unable to access servers in other parts of the country. This is often due to router or capacity problems at ISPs with which your provider has peering agreements.