First it was the quaking of the Earth under the weight of the DNS vulnerability that kept us awake at night. Experts predicted the demise of the Internet and cast doomsday shadows over the length of the web. Next came a laser focus on BGP and the potential for more damage to the global infrastructure. Following that came the financial crisis – which looks like it could kill the Internet from attrition when vendor, customer, banking and government dollars simply strangle it to death with a huge gasp!

Likely, we haven’t even seen the end of these other issues when a new evil raises it’s head. There has been a ton of attention on the emerging “sockstress” vulnerability. According to some sources this manipulation of TCP state tables will impact every device that can plug into a network and allow an attacker to cause denial of service outages with small amounts of bandwidth. If this is truly a protocol issue across implementations, as the researchers claim, then the effects could be huge for businesses and consumers alike.

What happens when vulnerabilities are discovered in things that can’t be patched? What happens when everyday devices that depend on networking become vulnerable to trivial exploits without mitigation? These are huge issues that impact everything from blenders to refrigerators to set top cable boxes, modems, routers and other critical systems.

Imagine the costs if your broadband ISP had to replace every modem or router in their client’s homes and businesses. What choice would they have if there were a serious vulnerability that couldn’t be fixed with a remote firmware upgrade? Even if the vulnerability could be minimized by some sort of network filtering, what else would those filters break?

It doesn’t take long to understand the potential gravity of attackers finding holes deep inside accepted and propagated protocols and applications.TCP is likely the widest used protocol on the planet. A serious hole in it, could impact risk in everything from power grid and nuclear control systems to the laundromat dryers that update a Twitter stream when they are free.

How will organizations that depend on huge industrial control systems handle these issues? What would the cost be to update/upgrade the robots that build cars at a factory to mitigate a serious hole? How many consumers would be able or willing to replace the network firewall or wireless router that they bought two years ago with new devices that were immune to a security issue?

Granted there should always be a risk versus reward equation in use, and the sky is definitely NOT falling today. But, that said, we know researchers and attackers are digging deeper and deeper into the core protocols and applications that our networks depend on. Given that fact, it seems only reasonable to assume that someday, we may have to face the idea of a hole being present in anything that plugs into a network – much of which does not have a mechanism to be patched, upgraded or protected beyond replacement. Beginning to consider this issue today just might give us some epiphanies or breakthroughs between now and the tomorrow that makes this problem real…