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Preparing for the Worst in IT
mplex writes "How vulnerable is the internet to terrorist attack? Is it robust enough to handle an outage on a massive scale? Should the commercial infrastructure that powers the internet be kept secret? These are the sorts of questions raised by Mark Gibbs in his latest column in Network World. 'There is an alternate route available for nearly all services through Las Vegas or Northern California serving all facilities-based carriers in Los Angeles -- all interconnected at numerous L.A. and L.A.-area fiber-optic terminals supporting both metro and long-distance cable.' Given that the internet thrives on open networks, it's hard to imagine keeping them a secret. At best, we must be prepared to deal with the worst."
Link in article broken, nice job editors!
Why, not only do the editors not read the stories anymore, they don't even read the submissions!
Why is terrorism "the worst" now? I'm much more afraid of a high-magnitude earthquake hitting the west coast of the US, or a major hurricane veering further north than usual on the east coast, than I am of some random bomb going off somewhere.
Just in the last year we've seen how a single earthquake in Taiwan can bring connectivity between Asia and the rest of the world nearly to a halt. Natural disasters like that are a sure thing and it makes much more sense to me to worry about that than about the latest episode of "24" coming true.
Which isn't to say that we should dismiss any possible threat entirely, of course -- but we should also prioritize our efforts. It's not possible to fully prepare for every possible problem.
Ironically, TFA actually claims that we are pretty well prepared.
here is a good link for the lazy http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/041607 backspin.html
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It might be hackneyed, but please remember the internet was designed to withstand hundreds of nuclear warheads. Half of any class of nodes can go down and the rest keep running.
I've been reading this site for years, and yet I'm constantly impressed by the quality exhibited.
For instance, in a story about how resistant the Internet is to attack, the editors apparently decided to demonstrate what a possible attack might look like.
Take a look!
Bravo!
Comment of the year
In this reply to a thread on security breaches, I said businesses need to have a plan for disasters of various sizes.
This goes for infrastructures as well. Those who manage them must be prepared for everything from a cable cut to a planet-smashing asteroid.
"Prepared" doesn't always mean being able to fix the problem. It may just mean declaring in advance that the problem won't be fixed and moving on with life. Or in the case of a disaster guaranteed to be fatal, accepting that this is the end.
If the citizens of New Orleans had been properly prepared for Katrina, they would have known that "If a flood destroys our home and our neighborhood and it looks like it will be years before city services are restored, then we will just move away."
As for the Internet:
I don't expect the Internet as we know it to survive an all-out, late-1970s-scare-scenario WWIII. But I do expect it to mostly survive if a handful of key locations and a few dozen cities without key infrastructure components are destroyed by nukes on the same day. The same goes for the phone company and the electric grid.
I would also expect governments to mandate civilian usage limits to make the remaining tubes available for government and emergency-management use.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I guess if an invading army decided to hit all your NAPS you're SOL (all your NAP are belong to us) but a greater threat might be a chip embargo during a war or a period of instability. Open up your box lately? The Asian Tigers have our peckers in their pockets. I fully expect this to occur downstream and it's a greater threat to "national security" than most want to admit.
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
Wrecking the US's communications systems would require a significant industrial expense and commitment, this doesn't come from terrorists.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Yes in theory. Remember it was designed to survive global thermonuclear war.
No in practice. Because it is cheaper not to. Those multiple routes and connections are more expensive than a simple, single one which works just fine on a clear sunny day.
The reality is somewhere in between.
There is already a tag which our software recognizes as indicating a typo in an article. It's 'typo'. This is in the FAQ. If you want to get the attention of the editor on duty, use the 'typo' tag.
The premise of Internet interuption is probably much more likely to occur as a result of natural disasters. A serious earthquake near Taiwan on Dec. 27th 2006 DID shut down most of the Internet for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6211451.st m I was IN China at the time and it was ... horrible. The major telcos in Beijing, China Netcom, was not so great at recovering from it. China Telecom in Shanghai did a much better job. Japan, Korea and Taiwan recovered much quicker because their ISPs were willing to spend money on alternate Internet paths via satellite. China Netcom was just too cheap and screwed over their customers.
The Internet never actually went completely down, but you were not able to surf the Internet. Email was problematic, but IM and VoIP still worked. Most of the problem was that port 80 requests far exceeded the available bandwidth, so everything just ground to a hault. MSN and Skype still worked like a charm. I had friends IM me web page content so that I could 'surf' pages I desperately needed to read. I also used proxies in Australia to gain access to the USA Internet and this worked quite well.
I think the idea of a terrorist organization trying to bring down Internet infrastructure is completely ludicrous. Terrorists want to take lives, and bringing down the Internet is not going to take (that many) lives. This is just another sad example of the sorry state of paranoya we live in under the Bush administration post 911. Just as there will NEVER be another successful hijacking of an airplane in the USA again, not because of the stupid security we have to go through at airports, but because normal every day airplane passengers will kill the terrorists rather than let terrorists take over an airplane again, ever.
We do NOT need to worry about things that will never happen, and terrorists trying to shut down the Internet by blowing up infrastructure? It is just NOT going to happen. A bomb would be better used where there is a high concentration of people. Maybe the Internet will be compromised through a virus or malware or bots - these are things we should worry about, but NEVER by physical force.
We really need to STOP giving attention to these fear mongers who promote these stupid ideas.
The perception of terrorism created by mass media is big deal, however, since that's what keeps the viewers glued to tv sets. How often do you get to watch people jump out of the buildings over 400 meters tall? The cost of lives lost is immeasurable to the immediate families, but on the national level, it was a relatively small bump (six times as many people have died in car accidents the same year). Far more damage to the country resulted not directly from terrorist attacks, but from the policies our own government has put into place: insane air travel restrictions, the PATRIOT act, the second gulf war, etc. Mass appeal madness is the one thing we do very well.
Just bomb second lifes datacenter
Terrorist may or may not attack the Internet directly. But how vulnerable is the Internet to Government attacks? Can the Internet (i.e. the end-to-end principle) survive all laws passes as a result of Governments using terrorists as an excuse to control it?
This is immensely overblown. I happen to directly oversee multiple nationwide optical networks of varying layers (1-4) with roughly a half terabit of real data capacity at my fingertips. Situations that could be considered OMG CATASTROPHIC occur semi-frequently, sometimes a few in a day, sometimes a couple weeks without. What most people don't understand is that there are long haul optics hanging right over their head carrying ~96 or more fibers, DWDM OC-192 (10G/s, so that's almost 2Tb capacity right there) that you could shoot down with your remington. And this happens. Or a power failure at a pop. Every time I pass a digging crew on the road, first thought "call before you dig m-f's!".
But terrorism against colo's, pop's, nap's, etc...? As part of network design, you have to take into account catastrophic failure(s). That means if a hurricane could tear through an area with a big colo/pop/nap presence (say atlanta), one's network better be prepared to handle the shift in traffic in case the worst does happen - like a second simultaneous failure elsewhere. It'll hurt, but as they say on the battlefield, acceptable casualties.
Bringing The Internet down by means of physical terrorist attacks is very unlikely (speaking modestly). Example: the verizon colo in the WTC buildings. That was a mess, but it was handleable. Peering and routing changes, move on. Taking down a physical point of presence would require some intense research and much more importantly DESIRE. This is the basic concept of hacking, given time and motivation, there's nothing that can't be toppled. So, take off your sweatin'-it pants, and chill. Do we really need any more paranoia at this point?
...must be to stop having 90% of desktop users on a series of operating systems for which the vendor has repeatedly failed miserably at adressing numerous vulnerabilities, causing widespread sabbotage, phishing and data theft costing god knows how much money every year. I mean seriously, can anyone actually come up with anything a terrorist organisation could pull off which is going to have a worse impact on the nets general stability security and performance than Microsoft windows? This is not even taking into consideration the cost of the hardware required to run a system which has between twice to four times the system requirements of the main competition, their repeated efforts to keep other companies of the market, or continued and deliberate breakage of APIs, standards and backwards compatability. I would seriously argue that at least as far as the internet is concerned, Microsoft is a MUCH greater problem than any terrorist organisation will ever be.