Zero Day Exploits and Over-reliance on Cloud Computing
A powerful rogue nation-state could cause major damage to the internet infrastructure if they managed to combine two zero day exploits in a concentrated attack on the CDNs which house modern applications
Exploit 1: Break virtualization
With cloud computing you are renting space on a virtual server to host your application. There are several of these servers on a single computer, but they are cordoned off, so they can't communicate with each other. If an exploit was found so this communication could happen, you could start accessing other people's software.
Exploit 2: Gain root access on Linux servers
Well now that I can talk to these other applications, I need an exploit to take control of their servers to install my malware, and hopefully send it on to any connecting computers pushing an update.
So How Exactly Would this Work?
I would make a company for each major cloud computing service which ostensibly has developed an app and hosted it there. In the server code of the app, I would hide the virus, which would do nothing but spread undetected for a long period of time, until it was even in the backups.
What would the bug do?
The virus would have trigger (possibly time based) and when triggered it would do two things - Delete any data on the host it could and try to connect to as many servers as possible to spread the virus.
By now the worm has likely infected most of the CDNs, so the virus spread is saturating the data links, resulting in widespread outages. ISPs quickly work to partition off infected networks, but that's everywhere. CDNs are cut off, and although the underlying data structure remains, the vast majority of sites are down because the hosting structure is down.
Over the coming days companies will scramble to recover any data and code they could. 115
Their success will depend on how much of it they had local backups for.
Long Term Effects
Eventually the vulnerabilities would be patched and some of the data recovered, but much of it is lost. Major corporations in all sectors go bankrupt, leading to a massive worldwide recession, which takes out even more companies. Tech companies have the it the worst, due to the series of new regulations, lawsuits, and customers leaving in droves.
Eventually the economy recovers, but public confidence in the internet is shaken for several generations. People won't trust putting their data up and governments regulations on the internet skyrocket, with different rules for each nation. Some Nations may even choose to completely isolate themselves from the global network. Some sort of massive networked data structures will return, but would look very different than the internet we know today. 998