The 7 people who can restart the Internet

Call them this era's Magnificent Seven. Seven people around the world hold the keys to the Internet, uniquely charged to restart the global network should a terrorist attack, hacking event or other calamity put it out of commission.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers developed the plan and chose the seven keyholders, according to a report at NewScientist.com. In the event of a major attack, the keyholders would combine the code they hold to recover the master signing key, necessary to restore the Web servers that power much of the Internet.

While no one could actually turn off the entire Internet, the new Domain Name System Security Extensions being deployed throughout the system ensures that Web sites had official approval and are digitally signed to document their authenticity. In the event of a major attack, DNSSEC could break the connections to the signed sites to protect them, according to a report in Metro in the United Kingdom.

The keyholders would be summoned to a base in the United States to oversee a reboot of the system, using their keys to enable it.

ICANN has chosen not to keep the keyholders' identies secret. They are:

• Paul Kane, chief executive officer of CommunityDN in England;
• Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist at Recursion Ventures in New York City;
• Jiankang Yao of China;
• Moussa Guebre of Burkina Faso;
• Bevil Wooding from Trinidad and Tobago;
• Ondrej Sury of the Czech Republic, and;
• Norm Ritchie of Canada.