Is it possible to bring down the Internet for the entire U.S. like in N. Korea

[wilblack]

With the recent news of the North Korean internet going down I have been wondering what would happen if the US were attacked in such a way. First of all is it possible (or likely) for a hacker or group of hackers to take down the Internet across the entire US? If so how? If not why not? And secondly how would a group of white hat hackers bring it back up. For instance could local groups bring up regional networks and then eventually connect them up across the country? I know this question is kind of vague but use your imagination.

[PaulHoule]

The conclusion of internet experts before about 2000 or so was that an attack to shut down the internet was impossible (you couldn't get enough bandwidth from an attack point) but the consensus changed around then as P2P came online and there were the massive virus infections.

If you could control a very large number of nodes (say all the Windows machines) then you could certainly disrupt the internet as a whole.