Criminal groups have been sending threatening messages in the past couple of months to companies that manage broadband phone services all over the world, promising they'll flood the digital phone lines with traffic and take them offline unless victims pay a ransom.

What those extortionists have discovered is that the number of phone calls that take place at least partially over the internet has quietly and dramatically increased over recent years — and there's a lot at stake when major providers go down. //

if there were going to be a kinetic war with an adversary — Russia, North Korea, Iran, whatever — look how fragile this is that some probably teenage kids with a botnet are able to take out major communication providers and demand ransoms from them," Wisniewski says. "What if it was a sophisticated, well equipped adversary like a nation state could wipe out our communication in minutes?"