Q: Is It Possible For a Virus To Wipe Out All the Information on the Internet?
A: This is very much like asking is it possible for a virus to wipe out all of humanity on the planet.
Even Ebola doesn’t have a 100% kill rate.
In the case of a computer virus, the virus would need to be compatible to run on 100+ different operating systems, able to read and write to many different storage device formats, and act fast enough so that it is able to attack worldwide so quickly no defense mechanism could be put in place (probably faster than 24 hours). It would also need to impact backups of backups of backups. Of which, most are read only – so cannot be erased, encrypted, or changed.
I’m sure there are at least a dozen other major hurdles it would have to overcome.
Overcoming one or two of these issues is easily doable. Overcoming all of them? It is not within the reach of technology as we know it today.
