The vital resilience of the UK internet
After two decades of growth, nothing shows how central the internet is to British lives than a national emergency. While we haven’t gone as far as France or Greece in defining access to the internet as a “human right”, it is central to our lives — and in times of crisis, being able to communicate with loved ones, and the rest of our community and society, is essential.
The London 7/7 bombings were probably the first major emergency in the UK where the internet and internet-connected mobile phones played a significant part in breaking the news, even though it was two years before the launch of the first iPhone. Rolling news stations gave the terrorist attack 24/7 coverage, but people turned to the internet in droves to find information about what was happening — like the eerie eyewitness photos from the underground tunnels where three of bombs went off, made possible by the prevalence of phones with cameras.
The BBC website homepage served an increasingly stripped down version with essential information about the emergency helpline in an attempt to keep delivering pages under a heavy traffic load. In those pre-iPlayer days, bbc.co.uk used RealMedia to deliver audio and video content, and on 7/7 it was serving 50,000+ streams and 10gigbits/sec of bandwidth.
The BBC site also formed part of how the country dealt with the grief following the attacks — producing a specially designed homepage to coincide with memorial services held for the victims.
The internet’s history, of course, starts with the idea of building a computer network — ARPANET — that would remain resilient in the event of an attack. ARPANET launched in 1969 with only four computers on the network — today’s internet has upwards of ten billion machines connected to it, and half of those aren’t even desktop computers or smartphones. There are other connected objects, part of what’s called the “Internet of Things”, where everything from trousers to toasters might one day be “smart” and know how to talk to everything else.
The ubiquitous internet has become part of the standard toolkit of emergency responses. In the aftermath of the recent Nepal earthquake, Facebook was involved in getting people to let others know that they were safe. If the service detected that a user had been posting updates from near the affected area, they were prompted to update a Safety Check status, so that others could see they were OK.
Fortunately in the UK we are relatively free of natural disasters, but the UK’s internet plays a vital role in helping to safeguard Britons at home and abroad
Fortunately in the UK we are relatively free of natural disasters, but the UK’s internet plays a vital role in helping to safeguard Britons at home and abroad. In the mid-2000s the Government published advice on the standalone site preparingforemergencies.gov.uk and the Foreign & Commonwealth office has all of its travel advice to the public available in one place.
The flipside of the internet becoming so embedded in everyday life, though, is that it itself is now both a target and a tool for attacks.
“Over the last 15 years the threat has increased exponentially”
“Over the last 15 years the threat has increased exponentially — whether it’s criminals or hacktivists, state-sponsored or just a hacker in his bedroom, the capability is huge,” said Cath Goulding, head of internet security for domain name registry Nominet.
One type of threat Nominet looks out for is DNS hijacking — “so when you type bbc.co.uk into the address bar, instead of going to the BBC’s IP address, you get taken to the IP address of a completely different site.” It’s a popular tactic of “hacktivists” like the Syrian Electronic Army, who famously pulled it off with eBay in 2014.
The thing about the internet is that “it’s like plumbing, it just works, it’s always there,” explains Goulding. “Because these people know that, we have to try and stop that happening.”
Effective international collaboration is the best tool to fight against these kinds of issues, she says. “We work with other organisations, like ISPs, and we work with the government, to have a response so that if anything bad was to happen we’d know how to sort it out. We can share information with other organisations around the world about the threats we see, and what’s best practice in terms of keeping things working.”
This story is one of 30 celebrating the launch of .uk domain names in 1985. To read the others visit our 30 Years of .uk hub. To start your own .uk story check out www.agreatplacetobe.uk.
