Denial of Service Attack (DoS Attack)

In computing, a denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make network resources unavailable to users. Although the means of intent may vary, it consists of efforts to temporarily interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet. DoS attacks are usually sent by one person or system while DDos attacks are sent from more than one person or system. they both target

DDoS Attack Diagram 

websites or services hosted on high profile web servers like, banks, root name servers, credit card payment gateways.

One of the many attack includes saturating a targeted machine with an abundance of external communications requests, that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, causing server overload leading to unavailable service or request.

This attack is common among businesses as a means of trafficking disgruntle customers or users to other website to complete what ever transaction, task or intentions, gaining advantage over competitors.

According to www.cnet.com " A massive distributed-denial-of-service attack on February 12, 2014 which reached more than 400Gbps at its peak, about 33 percent greater than last year's Spamhaus attack, the previous DDoS record-holder". There also went along to say that "The attack was apparently directed at one of the customers of content delivery network and security provider CloudFlare ................" The attackers leveraged a flaw in the Network Time Protocol (NTP), a network protocol used to synchronize computer clock times. It was said to have been felt particularly in Europe.

Similarly I was a victim to such attack. On the 18 of march 2014, Elance announce to have be attacked by a denial-of-service attack on their servers. The attack caused an influx of traffic to they website making it unavailable to all users. Elance is an online staffing platform based in California, United States.

Denial of service attacks are considered violations of the Internet Architecture Board's Internet proper use policy, and also violate the acceptable use policies of virtually all Internet service providers.

Question:
1.Can we still say the internet can;t be shut down?

Reference:
http://www.cnet.com/news/record-breaking-ddos-attack-in-europe-hits-400gbps/

http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cse571-11/ftp/cyberwar/

http://www.cert.org/historical/tech_tips/denial_of_service.cfm