Elon Musk Says Advanced A.I. Could "Take Down the Internet"

The internet is about to become a vicious, chaotic battlefield, and Elon Musk says advanced A.I. could make the carnage even worse. According to a short exchange on Musk's Twitter today, the systems that keep the internet running are particularly vulnerable to simple, brute-force computing attacks -- the kind of cyberwarfare that artificial intelligence excel at. On October 21, an unknown group of hackers wiped out part of the internet in the United States and Europe with a massive Denial of Service attack. The hackers used a massive "botnet" -- linked computers able to perform coordinated functions -- of simple Internet of Things devices to relentlessly overload the servers at Dyn Systems, which provides DNS services to a huge number of websites, including Spotify, Twitter, Netflix, and Reddit. For the most part, cybersecurity authorities believe that a human being or group of people orchestrated and executed the attack, plugging in the botnet's targets and making sure their digital blows landed.