Internet to Pakistan Goes Down

TwobyTwo writes "According to CNN, a power supply problem on an undersea cable has severed all outside Internet connectivity to Pakistan. Many businesses have been seriously impacted. Repairs will involve some disruption to access from other countries, and are tentatively scheduled for overnight." From the article: "'It's a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank,' said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified. An official at the Karachi stock exchange said Pakistan's main bourse was unaffected as it had its own internal trading system."

Comments

Re:Get your tinfoil hats here

[Exodious]

I've read stuff about that sort of thing before. I can't find the exact article but I did find this which is along the same thread. If I recall correctly, the one I had read basically said the main problem with tapping the cables is making sense of the HUGE amount of data you get.

Re:Get your tinfoil hats here

[Bendy Chief]

Source: CNN

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's submarine fleet Saturday, will have some special capabilities, intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.

The Navy does not acknowledge that the $3.2 billion submarine, the third and last of the Seawolf class of attack subs, has this capability.

"There are limits to what I can say on the sub's capabilities, but let's just say the Jimmy Carter is uniquely capable to perform missions vitally important to the war on terror," said Rep. Rob Simmons, a Republican and former CIA officer whose district includes Groton, Connecticut, where the sub was built.

But intelligence community watchdogs have little doubt: The previous submarine that performed the mission, the USS Parche, was retired last fall. That would happen only if a new one was on the way.

Like the Parche, the Jimmy Carter was extensively modified from its basic design, given a $923 million hull extension that allows it to house technicians and gear to perform the cable-tapping and other secret missions, experts say. The boat's hull, at 453 feet, is 100 feet longer than the other two subs in the Seawolf class.

Re:Dammit

[h4rm0ny]

Hold on a second - how hard would it be for Al Quaeda to send down a diver with a charge? You'd need some diving equipment and a boat with some sonar. Diving to depth is a skilled task, but so is flying a plane.

And it would be a target that cost billions of dollars without any loss of life. That would really be targeting the interests of US power-brokers.

Does the US have any major undersea pipes?

Re:That's pretty stupid

[DeepRedux]

One of the first English actions in WWI was cutting the German undersea cables. This did not cut off Germany, but it made English interception of German communications much easier. Eventually the British intercepted, and shared with the US, the "Zimmermn Telegraph" in which Germany proposed to help Mexico attack the US. This was one of the reasons the US entered the war.

hmmm where did .PK go?

[mnmn]

In the earlier days of the Internet in Pakistan, say 1996, the connection cost Rs70 per hour. In fact the first connection was from Paknet, the govt ISP.

Their connection was like a BBS system, where you'd dial into a BBS, and see the Linux 1.3.x kernel. You'd get a curses menu and seleced lynx to browse the net.

You could also select another option after which you could close the telnet window and use IE or netscape 3.0 through ppp.

Turns out, they were using a gigantic NAT, whereby everyone in Pakistan was channeled through a single IP address. Everyone knew that IP address, which was blocked by many IRC servers like the Dalnet. The customers must've been less than 65535 to fit at any time I imagine.

You'd have to try dialling MANY times to get a connection. At one time, we crossed the 100th attempt to dial to read a single email.

And boy was hotmail slow.

In the telnet menu, you could also drop yourself into a shell, which was my first brush with UNIX. All we knew was ls and cd (dont know how we learnt those, possibly from trial and error). We copied /etc/passwd, which was plaintext and humungous. The passwords were a simple MD5 hashes and didnt take more than a cracking script with words like 'pakistan' 'sex' 'fuck' 'god' 'allah' 'cricket' and common names like Ali to produce a significant list of passwords.

Now why would you run a whole country on a Linux server with kernel 1.3.x with bad security? It is amazing that even in beta, Linux held up well enough to run the country of Pakistan's internet connection. After all who could afford a cisco over there? Or even multiple IP addresses?

Here in Canada, businesses are commonly provided with 64 IP address blocks by Bell and Telus, even if they really need one.

Re:Weird...

[bheer]

Or maybe those companies knew that India has multiple redundant links: multiple transatlantic and transpacific cables, and satellite. An Indian telco owns FLAG. I doubt they'll lose much sleep over this.

Submarine cable landings are pretty diverse

[billstewart]

While many of the transatlantic cable systems are near each other, and some of them do share cable heads landing sites, there's also a lot of diversity, put in there specifically to prevent single events from taking out redundant systems all at once, and they're designed in self-repairing rings and meshes for most networks. The Pacific and Caribbean cable systems are pretty much the same way - it takes a lot of time and money to get diversity, and it's done because otherwise you can lose all your connectivity too easily. In India, there are at least three major cable landing locations, and systems like SMW-3 and FLAG use at least two of them, with land and water connections between the landings, to avoid getting disconnected. But Pakistan only has one spur off of SMW-3, and there are other small countries with similar problems along the Persian Gulf.

That doesn't mean you can't have multiple failures that take out redundant systems - about a year ago, there were multiple cable cuts on different sides of Singapore that killed parts of some of the cable systems, so carriers who only used one cable consortium were in trouble for a couple of weeks. Similarly, there was an earthquake in the Mediterranean a couple of years ago that took out parts of half a dozen cable systems, and it took a long time to get them all fixed.

Land-based internet peering points in the US do have the possibility of things going wrong - but that's why any respectably large ISP has physically diverse connections into their important buildings, and access rings using those connections that can restore around failures, and big ISPs peer with each other at multiple locations. There are occasionally geographically entertaining problems, like that railroad tunnel near Baltimore that caught fire a few years back, taking out the circuits from several major ISPs - railroad right-of-way is a very popular way to route long-haul fiber, and often carries multiple long-haul providers as well as local telcos. Fortunately, my employer's network didn't use that tunnel, but we had sufficient diversity in that area that cutting one of our cables would have minimal impact (we design everything with that objective, but there are places like crossing the Rockies where you sometimes have to go a long ways to get an alternate route.