The Cyberweapon That Could Take Down the InternetS      Surgical
strike    An attacker deploying the Schuchard cyberweapon would
send traffic between computers in their botnet to build a map of
the paths between them. Then they would identify a link common
to many different paths and launch a ZMW attack to bring it
down. Neighbouring routers would respond by sending out BGP
updates to reroute traffic elsewhere. A short time later, the
two sundered routers would reconnect and send out their own BGP
updates, upon which attack traffic would start flowing in again,
causing them to disconnect once more. This cycle would repeat,
with the single breaking and reforming link sending out waves of
BGP updates to every router on the internet. Eventually each
router in the world would be receiving more updates than it
could handle – after 20 minutes of attacking, a queue requiring
100 minutes of processing would have built up.  Clearly, that's
a problem. "Routers under extreme computational load tend to do
funny things,"