Hacker News Reader

The last major attack was in 2007, and only two servers were rendered unreachable:

http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/news/industry-deve...

For anyone to actually notice, you have to take down all 13 for 48 hours, and it will be another 48 hours after that before there is a complete outage for everyone.

With Anycast DNS there's actually more than thirteen servers even if there's only thirteen IPs.

It's going to be almost impossible to flood them all simultaneously. These are machines on multi-gigabit backbone connections, not some crappy back-water FBI or CIA web server.

FBI and CIA have posters not websites

It has indeed been attempted in the past. If memory serves me well, the best hackers could do was take 3 of the 13 out at the same time.

Given the built-in resiliency of the DNS system, wouldn't creating an alternative system[1] be more effective in disrupting the status quo?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNIC

Creating one is easy compared to getting people to use it.