Liberia internet down after huge cyber attack cuts web access for entire country

The attacks seem to be practice for a potentially disastrous hack

Unless we engineer for the future we risk long-term stagnation (Getty)

Liberia has lost access to the entire internet in apparent preparation for shutting down the entire internet.

Repeated attacks are flooding the country's network with requests and taking it down entirely. That has intermittently knocked the entire web offline, meaning that people can't access any websites or web services.

The attacks appear to be a way for hackers to test a variety of ways of attacking internet connections and taking offline. In that way they resemble the attacks launched recently, when hackers brought down many of the world's biggest websites.

The two might even be related and experts said they came from the same groups. The hacks could be a way of testing some of the same networks used in those attacks and which could be used for even more disastrous ones – networks that might be made up of devices that are currently sitting apparently innocently in normal people's houses.

Those devices are brought together into a botnet, where one central hacker can commandeer devices and use them for various purposes. That might include forcing them all to send requests and web traffic to a particular place – usually overwhelming that piece of equipment and causing outages for the people – or entire countries – that rely on them.

The hackers behind the attack appear to be very sophisticated, according to cyber security experts. The complexity of the attack appears to suggest it could be used to take down an entire nation state's internet again.

The attacks in Liberia are intermittent and are being pointed at the undersea cable that Liberia shares with other West African nations. By overwhelming the companies that look after those cables with requests, they can force them to break down and stop working.