With over seven billion people on earth and about 40% of them online, the web is among the resources that are main to shield, but is it fully shielded? We have all learned about bugs like the 512k router issue as well as Shellshock, but are there other threats which could bring down the world-wide internet?

Palladino is talking about broadly-deployed, their default option 512k routing table limit being hit by mature routers, a difficulty which has this year seen networks and sites knocked down.

At around 500,000 courses – a figure that is growing by around 1,000 courses per week – the increase of the global internet routing table reveals no signs of slowing. “What makes the issue even more difficult is that businesses do not need the pain of completely migrating to IPv6, so they’re attempting to extort as much IPv4 out of the leftover allotments as potential, which is just adding to the inflation of the routing table.”

Many businesses are becoming caught off guard, Palladino considers, and some painful lessons could be learnt by smaller businesses in particular.

There are theoretical risks – like the Kremlin’s plans to take charge of the .ru domain name and take Russia off the world-wide net during an ‘crisis’ – and there are serious difficulties due to authorities, including the ‘great firewall’ in China. The latest attempt of the latter is Green Dam, a piece of internet censorship applications which will shortly be pre-installed inside every computer.