Seven people across the world will hold a keycard which when put together will reboot the key part of the World Wide Web should a security breach, natural disaster or terrorist attack disable it.
It sounds like something out of a spy thriller movie or an episode of South Park, but this safeguarding measure is to enable the web to be restarted.
Out of these seven, only five are needed to come together at a secure location in the US to put together the DNSSEC root key from the fractioned code, which would enable the resetting and restarting of the service. DNSSEC is a new Internet security system, run by ICANN which protects users from online fraud and cyber-attacks.
As Popular Science points out, even though the ‘Internet kill switch’ that was rumoured last month may not be wholly accurate, to know that there is a group of select people in this world with actual, physical keys to the World Wide Web is beyond cool.
This video from Community DNS explains it in detail.
“Honey, I killed the Internet…”
