Slashdot Mirror
A Cyber-Attack On an American City
Bruce Perens writes "Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes in the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported.
So I decided to change that."
We should also consider whether it might be necessary to harden some of the local infrastructure of our communities. The old Bell System used to arrange cables in a ring around a city, so that a cut in any one location could be routed around. It's not clear how much modern telephone companies have continued that practice. It might not have helped in Morgan Hill, as the attackers apparently even disabled an unused cable that could have been used to recover from the broken connections.
Always assume the enemy knows the system. Hardening wouldn't hurt, but redundancy is the most important thing. Hardening a system tends to make it that much more vulnerable to a single insider. Redundancy mitigates this effect. Having such a small group be able cause so much disruption from such a relatively simple act makes it obvious that the city placed way too much on a single point of failure remaining in tact. Have redundant fiber. Have auxiliary wireless setups. Maintain a base of ham volunteers. Multiply your points of failure.
Personally, I think this sort of lax infrastructure security has become endemic. The 'war on terror' rhetoric we were fed for so long has us looking for the next suicide jet-liner attack or what have you, completely distorting any real conception the public had of real-world modern security risks.
I got a catholic block.
first! Honestly though, doesn't everything think it only was a matter of time?
Ham radio operators save the day once again... 'nuff said.
Lets not all go blaming terrorist organizations on this one.
My money is on unionized workers facing layoffs or payroll cuts. They would best know how to hurt the system and this sort of sabotage being linked to unions is not exactly unheard of.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Define terrorism.
Now define terrorist organization.
If an organized group of people orchestrated this attack in order to bring attention to some goal, wouldn't that make them a terrorist group?
Admittedly, an attack on property is not the same as an attack on people, but yet... to me this seems textbook.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Jesus. Here come four thousand posts about how awesome hams are, and how Internet over power cables sucks, etc.
My Dad was a ham. Yes, hams are awesome. In their nutty little useful-once-in-a-lifetime, semi-Luddite way.
We love you, hams. We're glad you're out there. But please, seriously, shut the fuck up. On the Internet. Feel free to blather on your radios.
-Peter
Indeed, that's very possible: the contract between the Communication Workers of America and AT&T expired on April 11th.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Hopefully this catches enough attention to get people to evaluate their area's utilities similar to the blackout across parts of the US and Canada back in 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_North_America_blackout
So now a "cyber" attack includes the physical destruction of hardware/infrastructure without any exploitation of any programming logic?
Well, I'd certainlly concede that this could be classified as terrorism but I was refering more to the "ZOMG TALIBAN" kind of terrorists. Modern media interpretation of the word. ;)
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I don't think it was terrorists. No terrorism occurred. I am just pointing out that the attack indicates that should someone really want to do something nasty, not just to Morgan Hill but to a larger city, and attack like the one in Morgan Hill is just too darned easy and disables the whole communications infrastructure.
Bruce Perens.
Bruce, the cable cuts were in San Jose and San Carlos. The cable between San Jose and Morgan Hill was cut, but the cut location was in the city of San Jose.
(otherwise, agree with what you said, hopefully wider audience for this will help...)
Perhaps a government operation on how to isolate "trouble spots" in the country should "trouble makers" be suspected?
wouldn't that make them a terrorist group?
I'd presume that some amount of "terror" would need to be created for one to be considered a terrorist. But maybe I'm old-fashioned.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/11/MNJB170JM7.DTL
If an organized group of people orchestrated this attack in order to bring attention to some goal, wouldn't that make them a terrorist group?
No.
What makes a terrorist group a terrorist group, is that they inflict, you know, terror .
Cutting some cables isn't going to (and, in fact, didn't) send the general populace into a panic.
Yes, it's an inconvenience, but unless they are trying to instill terror in the general populace, they're not terrorists.
You could extend "terrorism" to cover this incident; but it might not mean very much thereafter. "An organized group of people orchestrated this attack in order to bring attention to some goal" is a very low bar to set.
Or just regular blackmail:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/20/1427259
I assumed these were both the same story at first. But the YRO story was 2005, and this one was a few weeks ago.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Um, Bruce, there's a reason this didn't make news in mainstream media. Besides, I thought they had some internet out there in Californy! ---- Go ahead and mod me down, I've got karma to burn.
We had a similar cyber attack here in columbus, ohio. A disgruntled employee (it is thought) shot the fiber backbone for Time Warner with a .22. I don't believe they ever caught the guy who did this. This one action disrupted the internet for hundreds of companies and thousands of users. It took around 3 days to get the internet back up for everyone.
This was just one fiber cable, imagine if someone had purposely cut lines downtown?
The stuff is very centralized and not well protected.
There needs to be better protection against these sorts of actions, and there needs to be a backup plan in place in case something like this does happen.
A friend of mine is working for an entity involved in this. AT&T was trying to negotiate the (new) contract down, created and uproar and then this happened. They are 99% sure it was disgruntled CWA workers.
Define terrorism
It probably wouldn't involve people running through the streets screaming because their cable TV was out.
(Of course I realise that "fiber cables" can be used for much more important things than TV, but on a serious point I do think the word "terror" has had it's definition watered down a lot in the past few years).
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
This was discussed extensively on the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) email list.
It appears that the outage affected multiple carriers including ATT and Alternet.
Hosting and Domain name coupons
As far as I am aware, there were four locations entered, and eight cables cut. Do you have the locations for all four? If so, don't put it on Slashdot :-)
Bruce Perens.
I'd almost guarantee that the hospital involved new about this problem.
I've had apps with accidental\stupid reliances on external connetions. After having the external connection fail we usually took care of the issue.
I'm be shocked if the hospital hadn't lost internet connectivity for a least 10 minutes in the not to distanct past. So they would have known.
Some techy probably had warned about it to deaf ears.
Even something as simple as charging a credit card at a hospital should have some manual backup procedure. Given the hospital has the chance of loosing lifes why this basic DR scenario hadn't been more properly addressed
means some IT manager swept it under the rug...and chances are someone needs to get a stern talking to or canned.
911 is the scariest and hardest to defend. We need some sort of emergency tower to tower protocal for this sort of thing. Why couldn't
the phone companies hook their towers together to work around a fiber cut and then restrict phone calls to 911 traffic.
If it is 'terrorists', who are they scaring besides a few computer geeks who understand the complexity and instability of our infrastructure? Yes, someone is inconveniencing and possibly slightly increasing the level of computational system errors in one community slightly above background noise. Yes malware attacks, cyber attacks and Y2k did actually cause some financial and personal damage, but this damage will always pale in comparison to the damage caused by the fact that significant investment in software and systems quality ended with the Apollo program in the 1970s.
Um, was anyone terrified that the fiber had been cut?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
This sounds like a good old physical attack to me, not a cyber attack. Bashing in someone's computer with a hammer is not the same thing as a infiltrating it with a computer virus/worm/etc.
I doubt many readers here could physically fit into a manhole, much less survive a climb down any sort of non-motorized ladder.
Um.. That article explicitly refutes that rumor. Although they used weasel words to deny the suspicions in such a way that the suspicion seems more plausible to a casual reader. E.g. AT&T has not identified any suspects and does not believe Bruce Perens sabotaged their fiber like others have suggested. Although he did post a slashdot article about it two weeks after the incident...
Blaming those damn commie unions sure is popular.
Football Odds
My money is on unionized workers...
I think it was management, upset that so few people wore Hawaiian shirts on casual Friday.
""ZOMG TALIBAN" kind of terrorists. Modern media interpretation of the word. ;)"
Shortly to turn into "ZOMG Wobbly Anarchist Union Menace to be cleansed with fire and legislation" if formerly-gruntled union workers are found to be the cause...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Along those lines, apparently a single cable leaving california provides most of the indian bandwidth.
They probably need a bit more redundancy there.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The use of violence and terror for political aims.
That's why it's called terrorism
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Understood, I was just envisioning in my mind dozens of wingnut drones trying to make that connection.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I stayed in Morgan Hill last month.
It's not really a "city", more like a town south of the Bay Area.
This looks more like plain old (physical) sabotage, with the use of the word "cyber" to pander to the slashdot crowd.
If the definition of "cyber attacks" means "doing anything to hamper the internet", hurricanes and tornadoes have been committing cyber attacks against the mid-west for years now. Let's not even talk about typhoons, tsunamis, and other sorts of natural disasters.
I'm going to start the Outlaw Natural Disasters movement... Who's with me?
I changed the article to "cables serving the city of Morgan Hill" instead of "in" it.
Bruce Perens.
Truce's Parents write "Just before midnight on Thursday, April 22, unidentified attackers climbed up four firehoses on the geeky IT site of Slashdot and spread eight fearmongering exaggerations in what appears to have been an organized attack on the social infrastructure of an American community. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. So I decided to change that."
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
This was actually reported - in several places including PCMag.com. Just search google news and you can find several mentions of this outage/attack.
Bruce, pardon my tinfoil hat, but could it have been a 3-letter agency running a live simulation? The data would be skewed if the participants knew it were an exercise.
The entire Santa Cruz County area was cut off from all telecommunications outside of Point to Point wireless and Satellite. (Comcast customers aside.) Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, long distance for POTS was all down. TFN's were not able to be dialed by any customers. 911, 611, 411 were not functioning. 'Point-to-point' T1's that were aggregated over DS3's in Hayward, were not functioning for area users. Many of the "redundant" network connections for companies in the Monterey Bay area were completely down. Both legs of their "best practice" 2 provider networks were crippled.
Other than a couple islands of connectivity (namely the Shell Gas station at 41st and Capitola Rd in Capitola, my mother In Law's house, and my Uncle's business) who were lucky enough to only have Satellite service available to them, or were on Comcast, the packets stopped flowing.
Ironically Comcast services inside the Santa Cruz county were still working. Users of Comcast voice wouldn't have noticed (except for the fact that everyone they called went straight to voicemail.)
However, inter CO calling was working (you could
call anyone in the Watsonville-Santa Cruz area if they had a POTS line from a POTS line. Still, corporate communications for nearly everyone in the area (Ag. Brokers, Packers, Pickers, Shippers, Bottlers, etc.) Was down. Commerce came to a halt.
People couldn't get gas at gas stations around the area unless they had cash. Area banks wouldn't let people inside the bank unless you were making a deposit. People couldn't be players in the game of commerce without little pieces of paper. And so once again, cash was king.
More cars sat on the side of the road that day then normal between santa cruz and watsonville. Which begs the question how does the regular joe call for help if the call boxes can't talk to a phone switch?
Unions have a stake in their company, and no reason to do this sort of thing unless they actually have been laid off, or have taken an unfair pay cut, which is more likely to happen to non-unionized employees.
They might just be really, really, incompetent terrorists? I don't think we have a word mildinconvenienceists.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
My money is on unionized workers facing layoffs or payroll cuts.
I'd be more inclined to bet on anti-union people trying to make the union workers look bad.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
My money is on unionized workers
Well then, ionize the workforce in future.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
significant investment in software and systems quality ended with the Apollo program in the 1970s.
Do you travel on airplanes? Most of the newer ones are fly-by-wire now.
Surprisingly, there is a good deal of work on provable software systems. Everybody gets as much software and systems quality as they are willing to pay for. The hospital in question either wasn't getting what it was paying for, or wasn't paying enough. You can't afford consumer software with a life-or-property level of quality, that's why you don't get it. So instead we have things like Open Source that let us each invest as much as we want in making it better.
Bruce Perens.
I've always wondered: why fly a plane into a building? Its nice and dramatic but it would seem much easier to chop down telephone poles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
I don't think it was terrorists. No terrorism occurred.
Of course if I were looking to do something in the future, I'd probably want to see response times and methods before really sticking my neck out. That would be the case for an attack or just regular old theft. Most likely this is not the case but hopefully those in charge are keeping something like that in mind.
Frenchman to King Arthur - "You've got two empty halves of coconuts and you're bangin' 'em together"
I guess this kinda puts a damper on all the cloud computing hype of late...
When I first saw the way that one worked, I shook my head, and said "You're joking, right?"..
Alas, the answer was no. And the reason that it had been designed as a centralised system (well, ok, there's a 'failover' data centre or two) is (according to the designers) that you'll never lose the main and the redundant connections at the same time.
I seriously hope that they're paying attention to this at the moment. The severing of very few, carefully chosen fibres could quite simply deny a lot of UK hospitals access to their medical records. And if all come on board, then you could deny nearly all hospitals access to the medical records.
This, as can be imagined, would be rather a bad thing...
They might just be really, really, incompetent terrorists?
Considering there was no claim of responsibility, no demand, etc., I'd doubt it.
I don't think we have a word mildinconvenienceists.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I realize that applying simple labels makes it easier for sheeple to know whether they're "us" or "them", but it's not really productive as it makes it harder for them to make independant evaluations.
Bruce makes some good points, but he consistently undercuts himself "information" that is poorly sourced, poorly explained, or just plain wrong.
The question I'm most interested in is why the "internal only" network at Dominican Hospital went down. Bruce doesn't explain this, and I can't find a reference to it elsewhere. I suspect that he just has his facts wrong — Dominican is part of Catholic Healthcare West, and I'd be very surprised if the computers at Dominican didn't rely on servers in a central CHW facility.
That's still a dangerous vulnerability, just like Bruce says it is. But he'd be more persuasive if he checked his facts.
And dude, everybody but you knows that that internet technology research was funded by DARPA. Some DARPA personnel are in the Army, but DARPA has never been part of the Army.
And can we please stop repeating that idiotic myth about the Internet being designed to survive a nuclear attack? It isn't and it wasn't designed to be. The basis of the myth is that early proposals harped on the superior survival characteristic of a decentralized network versus the star topology networks of the time. Not quite the same thing.
I'd presume that some amount of "terror" would need to be created for one to be considered a terrorist. But maybe I'm old-fashioned.
Terrorist acts need not generate terror.
Part of the definition is that the acts can be designed to intimidate or cause fear.
Actions that don't fit your 9/11 definition of terrorism are still considered terrorism.
Ultimately, unless some ideological motivation is discovered, this isn't terrorism, just sabotage.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Lets not all go blaming terrorist organizations on this one.
My money is on unionized workers facing layoffs or payroll cuts. They would best know how to hurt the system and this sort of sabotage being linked to unions is not exactly unheard of.
I am not sure how it played out nationwide - but locally its been widely reported and was a major story ( here is Cronicle article)
From the story:
The vandalism comes as AT&T is in talks with the Communications Workers of America for a contract covering more than 80,000 employees, who have been working under their old deal since it expired at 11:59 p.m. Saturday. Union members voted in late March to authorize a strike but have not scheduled one.
Funny... wasn't it AT&T's cables that were cut in exactly the spots that only people working for AT&T would know would cause damage....
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Now define terrorist organization.
If an organized group of people orchestrated this attack in order to bring attention to some goal, wouldn't that make them a terrorist group?
While I understand what you are trying to say, somehow I doubt CWA would be declared a terrorist organization... at least not with Obama in office. (not that I think Bush would have done it ether)
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
I think the proper word we are all hunting for is "activist"
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
No.
What makes a terrorist group a terrorist group, is that they inflict, you know, terror .
Cutting some cables isn't going to (and, in fact, didn't) send the general populace into a panic.
Yes, it's an inconvenience, but unless they are trying to instill terror in the general populace, they're not terrorists.
Would that make them annoyanceists?
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
So by that definition, George W. "They hate us for our freedoms" Bush is the worst terrorist of them all?
That's irony so delicious you can slice it and put it in a cake ;-)
Um, was anyone terrified that the fiber had been cut?
People who had servers at 200Paul Colo? (Which I did until last year)
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
The cut location in San Carlos was reported as being at Bing St and Old County Road. That's actually alongside the rail line that runs up the SF Peninsula. There are many fibre optic cables along that right of way. It used to be a Southern Pacific Railroad line, and "Sprint" was originally Southern Pacific Communications.
There aren't that many long haul fibre optic cable routes. Many of them run along rail lines, because the railroad owns the right of way and doesn't need anyone else's permission to run cables. Often you can run cable for miles without crossing a street, which makes installation much simpler.
Or saboteurs?
Until we know who did it and why, it's not reasonable to consider them activists, terrorists, or anything really but criminals and/or saboteurs. They did trespass and destroy property, so that's a crime, and apparently did so with the intention of disrupting communications systems, which would be sabotage.
I agree. I think the KKK or violent urban street gangs qualify as terrorists more than a group that severs communication lines. I think the latter would be more like malicious vandals. Kind of like someone who superglues door locks at a high school.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. So I decided to change that.
DUUUUUUPE
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/09/2044205
I guess it's kinda reasonable to use the term for an attack on the "cyber" domain (by going after its physical substrate) as well as for attacks that occur within that domain. Either way, it screws up people's access to comms.
I don't think it's reasonable, at least not enough that we should accept it and start using "Cyber Attack" to refer to the target of the attack rather than the means. The reason basically boils down to the opposite of attack, which would be Cyber Defense, and what was mentioned earlier on /., the Pentagon Cyber Command.
If we accept this meaning of Cyber Attack, then that means that an airplane that drops a bomb on an ISP is a "Cyber Attack", while bombing any other form of infrastructure would be a "regular attack". Logically this would also mean that an anti-aircraft gun that is placed near an ISP is a form of "Cyber Defense". Except that isn't logical, it makes no sense. Anti-aircraft defenses should not be under the purview of Cyber Command regardless of where they are located.
No. I insist that the adjective "Cyber" before the word "Attack" should indicate the means, not the target, in the same way that Cyber Defense should mean securing computer networks, not preventing physical assaults that may or may not happen to hit internet infrastructure.
This was nothing more than plain ol' sabotage. It's the same as them destroying a sewage line, except the impact was different. If it was a power line, that too would have cut off many forms of communication, is that a cyber attack? No. It's an attack.
The enemies of Democracy are
Note that the attack did knock out emergency response in several cities, and there were reports of increased armed robberies during the communication outage in affected areas. While defining this as terrorism is unwarranted, as it is unlikely that the attack was meant to physically harm anyone directly, it does go beyond mere vandalism when you put people's lives at risk, by preventing them from reaching the hospital, fire department or police in case of emergency.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
You cut the fiber at point A so you can install a tap down the line and nobody will know.
This isn't some terrorist plot. This is a Government plot to install data taps in California at the cross-roads of the internet. Check the building next to the manhole - I bet it has 10 floors but the elevator only shows nine floors...
Hey hey hey! Hold it right there. I think there is LITTLE that strikes fear into the hearts of most nerds like being cut off from the net. So before you go waving your burning flags and crying alla akbar, maybe you should consider whistling like a 14.4k baud, and putting on that "I make Token Ring Networks" t-shirt.
On slashdot, THAT my friend, is true terror.
If you want to be a real tard, maybe throw in some rhetoric about head to head gaming via Com1!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Yes, the person dialing 911 and getting nothing!
Why bother
"mildinconvenienceists" -- I like that! This is going into my lexicon. I'll be referring to these kinds of people from now on as "MIs".
Defining terrorists does not necessarily == Taliban or OBL
Recall Oklahoma City & Timothy McVeigh?
We have plenty of our own nut cases running loose in every city to do something such as this.
My money is on the local union of telecom workers which would know exactly which line to cut and how.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
The day my employer strips me of my loosely bound electrons is the day I give notice.
Unless of course I'm on the "to be negatively charged" list, in which case:
Sucks to be you, alkali employees!!!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Thirty years ago Arco Oil and Gas had full data center backup. Where is this thought today in our attention deficit management world?
ARCO did NOT depend on their local Plano TX data center. ARCO had a building prepared in Independence KS on top of pipelines that was an empty data center. They had a contract with IBM to get the next big iron off the production lines. That combined with their backup tapes means quick switch over.
ARCO also never allowed all top executives to travel on the same jet. They flew TWO jets with passengers selected for functional redundancy. Two jets to the same location by the way.
I like the idea, if possible, of local redundancy. Like hospitals have generators.
I would appreciate examples of backup and redundancy today. These quiet things are often unnoticed.
Cheers,
Jim
or maybe we could deal with the outsourcing issue in one snip...
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school from 2004-7. Being in the aftermath of Columbine and 9/11, we did take concern about a coordinated attack on the school. While there's obviously difficult to stop a determined attack, I did what I could...
- All the administrators, myself included, had real two-way radios that didn't depend on a LAN or PBX. The only problem: to span the 37-acre campus and penetrate 21" concrete walls, we had a 50 W repeater in the attic with a roof antenna. The repeater could have had a battery, but, of course, it didn't.
- The PBX had a UPS and was on the generator circuit. The LAN had media converters and switches all over the damn place, with UPSs only on the servers, router, and MDF. The school district insisted on schools having PBXs, since they are more fail-safe than IP phone systems. Also, PoE tends not to work with a fiber-to-the-desktop LAN that was installed in the "Fiber is cool!" early 1990s.
- The intercom was a traditional system too, with each speaker and call station home-run to the generator-connected control cabinet. Once again, an IP intercom wouldn't have been reliable.
- The burglar/fire alarm communicator had two phone lines. Of course, some genius had them both running through the PBX, so if the PBX failed...
- The PBX was in an always-unlocked basement. My suggestions to lock the damn thing fell on deaf ears. It wouldn't have mattered anyway--janitors would open any door for anyone after hours, no questions asked. I could have gone right in and taken out the PBX and burglar/fire alarm with one switch.
So far, I haven't heard anyone suggest that the reason could just be diversionary tactics.
Step 1: Cut lines in location A so that it will be blamed as the cause of downtime.
Step 2: Splice listening device in at location B.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
or something like that...
"We are the Judean People's Front crack suicide squad! Suicide squad, attack!"
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I live here in the Bay Area and it was reported on like mad. Most fingers immediately were pointed at disgruntled AT&T workers over their contract issues. AT&T actually put out a bounty (last I heard $250,000) for connections leading to an arrest.
Regardless of who did it, what struck me as the most naive is the police were trying to say that they were surprised someone cut them because the manholes are very heavy. Like the heft of the manhole covers is the only necessity to detriment vandals, thieves, bums, etc.
A terrorist is some one who hurts you to get me to do what he wants. A person who hurts me to get me to do what he wants is just my enemy.
(Whether some one is a terrorist is really less about the fear than it is about involving the bystanders.)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Bruce was one of the main ramrods getting the requirements eased so that more folks would get Ham licenses.
Oh -- come on! Terror?!? Hardly. Bloody bodies in the street is terror. Attacking a corporation's infrastructure (even when it is depended upon by the public) without the intent to harm individuals is not terrorism.
This is classic sabotage. It has a long and noble history.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
That's not news to anyone.
Well whoever it was, AT&T is offering up $100,000 to find out. Sounds like AT&T might be a little upset.
Below is an excerpt from the article. The link to the story has an interesting video clip from a local news station (see "video gallery" (flash)). Interesting to me, anyway, as I've never seen a cut fiber cable flopping about. The "play by play" event sequencing was also interesting to see; sounds like it hit the fan about 2am local time.
---begin---
AT&T is Now Offering a $100,000 Reward for Phone Vandalism Information
AT&T is now offering $100,000 reward for information leading to arrest/conviction of those responsible for California phone vandalism. To report information call 408-947-STOP
Police say someone cut the fiber optic cables inside the south San Jose vault on purpose early Thursday morning. ...etc...
---end---
We'll call them "attempted terrorists."
My fellow Americans, let's restore the death penalty for child rapists. Let's do it . . . for the children.
Actually sabotage is indelibly linked to workers, especially disgruntled ones, it's where the term originated...
> Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. So I decided to change that."
rock on!
The logical technological response to this is to have a central record repository with local caches at each hospital.
That way, if the central database is not accessable there is still a chance that your records are cached locally.
No, that's not correct, though there's a certain amount of Moore's-Law-like behaviour where the newest cable always has a significantly higher capacity than anything built before it. There's a limited number and capacity of cables going from India to Europe through the Mediterranean, but a somewhat larger number going to and/or around Singapore, and from there there's a wide range of cables heading to North America, either more or less directly, plus a bit of connectivity going to North America by way of Australia and even less going to Europe around the southern end of Africa.
For India-Europe, the cables mostly go through the Med, and have been getting cut a lot recently, usually by ships but occasionally by earthquakes. For India and Southern Asia to Japan and North America, almost everything passes between Taiwan and the Philippines, as we discovered in the earthquake a couple of years ago that took out 95% of it at once (and there's now an effort to build some that go around the other side of the Philippines, but the geography's difficult, and there's some growth in land-based cables across Russia and Kazakhstan.) Australia has decent connections to the US, if you don't mind a few thousand extra miles worth of milliseconds, but their connections to Japan that don't go through the Taiwan Straits mostly go via North America, though there's increasing growth in connections via Hawaii and Guam that cuts off some of that distance.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lets not all go blaming terrorist organizations on this one. ...
My money is on unionized workers facing layoffs or payroll cuts.
What about a company that specializes in hardening network infrastructure? They have concerns about payroll cuts AND increasing share holder value!
I won't suggest government agencies interested in expanding the "theater of security" because I don't have my tinfoil hat on.
Y2K did nothing, it was just an excuse for lots of american tech companies to scare everybody into giving them money!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Sure, you can do things like reducing single-points-of-failure, beefing up security, but you can do this only to a point. At some point, you realize that society is, by nature, cooperative, and if you remove that basic assumption of cooperation, society will fail.
There aren't any exceptions to this. There are just too many possible things that can be destroyed by people who desire a society or civilization to perish.
You can salt fields. The Romans did this thousands of years ago, and the areas they ravaged are, to this day, incapable of meaningful agriculture.
You can poison drinking water. LSD is pretty easy to make cheaply, and a single pound of it thrown into a public water system would cause mass insanity.
This list is infinite: You can destroy power lines, you can cut fiber cables, you can make a bomb out of fertilizer and destroy a building or the Golden Gate Bridge or any of a quintillion other things that are both easily done and highly destructive.
A society is secure when its population are generally happy with it continuing. When a society reaches the point where enough of its population are disenfranchised with it, it will becomes incapable of maintaining the critical infrastructure necessary for a complex civilization. Adding security measures such as multiple points of failure quickly become reasons NOT to fix why anyone would want the civilization to perish in the first place - and thus actually make the civilization LESS secure.
And that's just the simple truth of it. So, if we want to be secure, we need to clear up the reasons why people would want our culture to fail. These include things like
A) Not torturing people.
B) Allowing other countries to be sovereign in their own affairs.
C) Not being overly greedy with our wealth. Exploitation is only good for the short term - it's a long-term destabilizing force and that's bad for everyone.
Really, I don't get it. You get people who swear by our Constitution yet somehow think that torturing is OK. Perhaps they should read the 4th and 5th ammendments? This issue is a deep, dark stain on the freedoms we are otherwise so quick to espouse.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
From the article:
What "appears" (to the author of the article) to "be an organized attack...blah..infrastructure..blah". What made this "organized", that it takes two people to lift a manhole cover (which isn't locked)?
Journamalism.
I wonder why this "Bruce Perens" (if that is his real name) didn't mention that they found tea bags strewn around near the severed cables? Hmmmm?
I notice from the San Jose Mercury article that Verizon took the brunt of damage and was the only carrier that was completely out for a short period of time. Hmmmmm...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I was voting for the CWA as well...
This happened the same day the CWA was reported as saying "contract talks with AT&T are not going well", 5 days after most of the employment contracts in California expired and AT&T tried to low-ball the healthcare benefits they'd be giving union workers in the future, and force a series of job cuts. One imagines that, in a down economy, AT&T felt they had their workers over a barrel, since job prospects are tighter these days.
Here's a telecom industry rags take on the whole thing: http://www.fiercetelecom.com/special-reports/cwa-strike.
-- Terry
If an organized group of people orchestrated this attack in order to bring attention to some goal, wouldn't that make them a terrorist group?
Really? Terrorists almost always see themselves as 'freedom fighters' and are usually linked to the receiving end of some kind of occupation. (Militant Islam takes it a notch up, though.)
The object is terror, in order to weaken the resolve of 'the oppressor' --- or to strengthen their resolve in such a way that crackdowns on the oppressed group will spur them to mass resistance.
Either way, terrorism is useless without an accompanying propaganda campaign, which means someone claims responsibility, or at least links the violence to a cause.
Contrast this to my teenage years, where as a suburban youth in high school I witnessed plenty of not-so-petty vandalism carried out in an organised way by one particular group, just for kicks. They were bored bullies. Life and limb of innocent bystanders were at risk in their exploits, and yet they preferred anonymity. (This also taught me that mayhem is relatively easy to cause, even for stupid teenagers... so where are all the bad guys?)
I say that if anonymity is maintained in this case, then it's more like organised crime or espionage than terrorism, and the message being sent was fairly narrowly targeted.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Terrorist acts need not generate terror.
Part of the definition is that the acts can be designed to intimidate or cause fear.
Actions that don't fit your 9/11 definition of terrorism are still considered terrorism.
That's odd... the Merriam-Webster dictionary lists "terrorism" as "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion"... M'self, I'd be more likely to call this "hooliganism".
...and while we're on the subject, what would YOU consider to be the difference between "fear" and "terror"?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I don't know how old you were on January 1, 2000, but I probably wouldn't be far off is I guessed you weren't old enough to have worked on Y2K stuff, old enough to vote, old enough to drive, or maybe not even old enough to get dressed by yourself for school in the morning. You're certainly far too ignorant of Y2K to be talking about it.
The reason Y2K was pretty much a non-event (I say pretty much because there were some failures, but they were generally of the minor/hahaha variety) is because of all the fixing stuff that went on during 1999. I was a sysadmin at the time, and even though we were pretty sure all our systems were properly patched, my entire department spent the night of December 31, 1999, until the wee hours of the morning, in our office. Pizza, snacks (and once we were sure nothing was going to go wrong, other refreshments) were provided by our CTO. To his credit, he also spent the night at the office. Not because he expected to be needed, but because if he was requiring us to do it, he was going to put in the hours, too. And besides, somebody had to pay for all that stuff :)
everything was documented as Santa Cruz here in cali....
200 years ago we didn't have any of this crap, and survived just fine. Why are we so dependent on it now? Sure, I like some of the creature comforts, but if the lights all go out I'll just go outside and look at the stars for a change...
Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea if they just turned it all off at random intervals, and help us realize we don't have to and shouldn't be so dependent on it...
hospitals have generators.
In addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a "paper system" for the day.
Hospitals have generators, true. But I know of one hospital that keeps all of it's patient records via remote Windows terminal sessions to a datacenter in the next state.
Not a small hospital either. A huge one. And it sounds like that is the norm.
Windows terminal sessions. Not a remote database for redundancy. Not something that can be cached. A hospital, with complete dependence on a single real-time data link across hundreds of miles. Let that sink in.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
You sure it wasn't the fiber optics companies that were behind this?
I'm reminded of the recent incident involving Baxter International (the giant pharmaceutical company with ties to SAIC and AIG), long a manufacturer of Avian Bird Flu vaccine, which hasn't been doing very well in peddling that vaccine due to minimal market demand.
Several months ago, although receiving virtually no press in the USA (there was wide coverage throughout the Euro press), Baxter International "accidentally" sent out a batch of mixed together (highly contagious) human flu with avian bird flu, resulting in a pandemic-capable mixture distributed to some sixteen labs throughout Europe.
Fortunately, a Czech lab discovered the "mistake" and immediately reported it to the proper UN agency and back to Baxter.
even without those eight fibre cables. Rumour has it there were societies coping without Internet, telephone or even a widespread mail system. If they could, so should we - that is my wish.
The triple scourge of the destroyed American economy: (1) offshored jobs or imported scab workers, (2) leveraged buyouts and "pump and dump" schemes, destroying companies and jobs, and (3) the ultimate investment, banking and insurance fraud: the derivatives market.
Orrrr.. How about the possibility of disgruntled NSA operatives removing their warrantless wiretapping devices in a lazy and inconsiderate manner?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Yeah, but that's because you're not living in a city with their fibres cut.
signature is pants
And you're an AC with nothing to contribute and a serious attitude problem. Go fuck yourself.
It's not hard to get private entities to build redundant systems as long as they get paid for it - they're trying to sell reliable service to customers, and many kinds of customers need redundancy, and it's very hard to provide even regular reliability without it. If they had had better geographical diversity down there, then the vandals would have had to cut two different manholes in south county to do the job instead of cutting one down there and one up in the location they vandalized. Post-2001, it _is_ harder for businesses to get information on what redundancy is available, because while they all are much more aware that they need it, the governments have pushed the never-tell-anybody-real-locations paranoia - and realistically, while everybody can tell that the large building downtown with no windows and a faded bell logo on the wall is a telco office, the only way they can tell where fibers are is to look for the "Don't Dig Here - Fiber" signs which don't tell you which ones are critical.
What's hard to get is Right of Way, and governments can sometimes help that but often interfere - highway departments can be really difficult to deal with, compared to railroads which are usually much more helpful because they're in business and you're paying them. It's especially a problem in the area south of San Jose, because the government regulators constrain ex-monopoly-telcos to operating in LATA boundaries, and they're near several LATA boundaries down there (because it used to be mostly empty farmland, and a lot of it has hills that aren't stable enough to put significant housing on, so most of the area is either reservoir watersheds or cattle ranches on one side of the freeway.) It used to be that the only industry down there was one railroad company, some farmers, and biker bars, and it was 30-40 miles from Watsonville up to the San Jose POP, a frequently-flooding river between them and Santa Cruz, and a LATA boundary between them and Monterey. Even so, I found it surprising that one well-placed cable cut was enough - usually there's one direct connection available and if a business customer needs redundancy, you can find them a second connection but it'll cost a lot more because it has to go a lot longer.
But even in northern Silicon Valley and the peninsula, there are a number of areas that don't have as much redundancy as they'd like because the locations where telcos can cross freeways are limited. From a nationwide carrier perspective, things are better - while there are some constraints, like a limited number of railroads and highways crossing the Rockies, and a few major cities that have limited numbers of bridges and tunnels, so cable cuts out west will cost you a bunch of extra milliseconds, but the carriers do have alternate routes, and the growth of Microsoft and the Phoenix-area financial and high-tech data centers has meant that everybody's got extra capacity on the northern and southern routes as well as I-80.
The one other source of right-of-way I'm familiar with was a gas pipeline company that ran lots of fiber along their routes. They had a certain advantage over the rest of the industry, because while Bubba the Backhoe Driver might ignore a "telco fiber - don't dig here" sign, a "Gas Pipeline! Explosive! Flammable! Don't Dig Here or You'll Blow Up and Die" sign generally got its point across better.
Disclaimer: This is entirely my personal opinion, not that of any current or past employer.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No 'cybers' where harmed during this attack, nor were any cybers assisting the attackers, so I don't think you can accurately call it a 'cyber attack'
More accurate would be to label it a 'boltcutter terrorisim'. We should move quickly to ban and outlaw bolt cutters, wire strippers and pen knives, since all could be used in future attacks of this sort.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The moral seems to be that if you want your internet to reliably stay up, but can't be bothered to protect the infrastructure (and fair enough to some extent, since it would be a tough job) then you need a wireless backup for every community. Something that can bypass the cut and provide a trickle of internet.
Assuming we only think we'll have this problem occasionally in one place at a time, maybe a mobile solution would be appropriate. A pair of vehicles, wirelessly linked, that hook up to either side of the cut and bridge it seamlessly.
In other words, our only problem is that the internet isn't a truck.
So by that definition, George W. "They hate us for our freedoms" Bush is the worst terrorist of them all?
That's irony so delicious you can slice it and put it in a cake ;-)
Wow, you have an absurdly low threshold for fear. Do you get nervous when someone walks up to you and says such potentialy scary things like "Hello"?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
"A friend of mine is working for an entity involved in this" + "They are 99% sure it was disgruntled CWA workers" == 100% ironclad credibility. As President of Slashdot, I order that we invade south San Jose and San Carlos and locate those WMDs. We don't want the next Morgan Hill to come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
If disabling 911 service is not a potential source of terror, society really has turned into something lower than an ochre jelly.
One minor 'haha' failure I know of cost a fortune 500 company about 1 job a month worth of lost revenue. The contractor who found it was the first out the door. Yes, Y2k engineers caught a reasonable percentage of Y2k bugs but the main reason it was a relative 'non-event' had more to do with the background level of bugs in nearly all software.
So, why does this have to be an attack on the electronic infrastructure and not just an incident where a group of people were scavenging copper to sell it?
This wasn't unnoticed, and cities are quietly discussing this issue and coming up with solutions.
Real solutions take time and money. They can't be don't 'Now'.
But you go ahead and make the front page so every god damn wanna-be starts cutting cables.
This isn't software.
Dick.
Just a pet peeve: "epidemic" means widespread and out of control (especially said of a disease), "endemic" means native and largely limited to this native area.
For instance: Malaria is endemic to the tropics (it is native to the tropics and confined to the tropics). That doesn't necessarily mean there's an epidemic of malaria in the tropics.
There's an AIDS epidemic in Africa, but AIDS is not endemic to Africa (cases are found all over the world).
running your 14.4K baud modem with your "I make Token Ring Networks" t-shirt and gaming via Com1... on Windows 98 SE!!!!! I crap my pants every time my brain dredges THAT memory up. Now if you'll excuse me, I've done something unholy in my underroos YET again...
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
"..to intimidate or cause fear."
So you mean..terror?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"...to me this seems textbook."
Which textbook? I ahve several that specifically address these issues in front of me right now, and I would love to confirm your statement~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Bruce Perens is a "ham". He has an agenda: to show how "hams" can save the day.
O.K. I exaggerated slightly but:
Software Bug Halts F22 Flight There are indications that fly-by-wire contributed to or caused crashes of an FA18 and some commercial Airbus planes which is why, unlike Airbus, Boeing designs allow the pilot to override fly-by-wire.
By the same token, ever since the Therac 25 deaths, there are FDC regulations preventing certain medical devices from being completely under software control (CT scanners, radiation therapy machines...) This is a good thing. Moore's law has allowed us to create software of a complexity that is either beyond what any human can understand and effectively test. Many eyes helps but QA doesn't really get the respect in opensource communities that development does and many commercial companies see QA as an unnecessary expense. Look for more accidental failures as companies trim their investment in quality during these difficult economic times.
That's odd... the Merriam-Webster dictionary lists "terrorism" as "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion"... M'self, I'd be more likely to call this "hooliganism". ...and while we're on the subject, what would YOU consider to be the difference between "fear" and "terror"?
We can argue dictionary definitions for days and not get anywhere, since there is no truly agreed upon definition of terrorism.
What everyone does seem to agree upon is that terrorism has three fundamental parts:
The action, the ideology/goal the action is meant to advance, and the disregard for non-combatants.
If there's no ideology/goal, then its not terrorism.
If only combatants are attacked, then it is irregular warfare, not terrorism.
There are obviously gray areas... which is why no definition has been universally agreed upon.
And AFAIK the difference between fear and terror is one of degree, not kind.
Focusing on the word "terror" causes you to lose sight of the bigger picture.
Radio spectrum suddenly has great value, causing concern that ham bands may be auctioned off to the highest bidder. BPL has been touted as the broadband savior, but most implementations cause radio interference. That's bad for hams, but also for anyone that transmits or receives with a radio. It's difficult to find a house or community that you are allowed to put up an antenna any more. "It's an eyesore." Never mind that for many years that was the only way for anyone in the United States to watch TV.
Meanwhile, hams donate a bunch of time in the name of public service and in many cases safety. But, hams are normally not the "main story". We are normally in the background. So the public is generally unaware of the amount of time that hams donate to the community. Count the number of times that you've seen a ham in the news and you can easily multiply that by 10. Locally, we get mentioned in the paper once for about every 30 or 40 events that we help with. So here are the hams informing Slashdot readers so that at least a fellow geek understands that ham radio is still very relevant.
Slower than Internet... certainly. Faster than texting... but that's another story. :-) As broad an expanse of information as the Internet... no way... but probably much more then you realize (CW, voice, data, satellites, directional location, moon bounces, public service, etc). Have you called for medical help for anyone lately through the Internet... probably not. I'll be helping with an MS walk this weekend (as a ham). Hopefully, I won't have to pass any major medical traffic. Not that I'm worried about passing the traffic. Just that I want the people to be safe. I'm already scheduled for two parades this summer and all the weather watching (to NWS, not just for fun) that I can make time for.
I'm not say that hams are superheros or something. I'm saying that Hams are still relevant. If you don't realize that, then you don't know enough about hams. We'll take all the good press we can get.
beta terrorists. still a few bugs in their system
rewriting history since 2109
Everyone should get ice cream.
But seriously, why should there be nothing on the internet or attached to it that could threaten national security?
The obvious answer to that is because it increases the risk.
Consider that any radio communication between soldiers in war can potentially be a risk because there is the possibility of interception. Does that mean that radio should not be used? no!
The more subtle answer to that is that the internet isn't yet perfectly secure or maybe 'secure enough'. The answer to that is to be educated and use encryption. Don't forget the original purpose of the internet.
Even addressing security questions, you might say "if there are alternatives that work, just let the government use those." Well, fine, but that may sacrifice efficiency.
Maybe I'm wrong, but there seems to be a very compartmentalized attitude in such an objection. The government..should do whatever it does and just leave me alone. *I* should not have to pay attention to the safety of the people around me since that is not my job. Everything must be cut and dried. There is a hierarchy and I will do as told and no more and I expect everyone to follow rules to the letter.
you're one of those anti-labelists, aren't you? You and your labelism!
rewriting history since 2109
I am the Network Administrator for an ISP (AS4307) in San Martin, CA (between Morgan Hill and Gilroy) that was directly affected by the cuts.
We are multi-homed by two providers. BOTH providers fiber ran through those SONET rings that were cut. We were COMPLETELY isolated (internet, POTS AND cell) from 2:15am to 10:42pm. Luckily, 90% of our customers are in the Morgan Hill/Gilroy/San Martin/San Jose area, so they were fully aware of what happened.
As a side note, the cuts were actually in San Jose. I live 3 blocks from where the cuts occured (Monterey Hwy and Cottle Rd. for those interested). And it did not just affect Morgan Hill. Some parts of South San Jose were affected, along with Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy, Watsonville, Santa Cruz, and parts of Hollister.
What was interesting was when service was restored, customers who lived out of the area who had not heard of the happenings here, called and told us they thought one of two things:
A) We went out of business
B) Natural disaster (Earthquake was #1 on the list, considering where we are located)
We lost no customers over this fiasco, and are now looking at getting a provider that feeds from completely separate fiber (i.e. from the SOUTH)
Robert Glover
Director of I.S.
South Valley Internet (AS4307)
Odd that AT&T contract is UP, the union is threatening strike and crucial infrastructure in the area is damaged. A little birdie speculates there might be some connection...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Dude, you're dating yourself
as a side note- token rings are much less troublesome than Tolkien rings.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
... and that two cable cut sites had been found, I speculated that there were two more sites. Turns out that was the case.
The SONET network is normally configured in a ring, or a set of interconnected rings and ring segments - a net with MOST nodes being points on a line and a few being points at a Y junction. (It's the cheapest way to insure two geographically diverse paths to every site when you have to dig things up to string your connections.) The rings are configured so that a cut link is automatically bypassed. (The traffic may already be propagating around the ring both ways and the sites just switch to the side that still has good info. Or it may have reserved bandwidth and when a link goes down the sites beside the cut "fold the traffic back" onto the reserved bandwidth.
Packet networks can have similar redundancy characteristics:
- They may be carried on existing SONET infrastructure.
- They may be connected as "Redundant Packet Ring" - essentially the IP equivalent of SONET rings using arbitrary transport methods with the same physical layout.
- Or they may have any of a number of other net-style redundant connections. (But they usually reduce to the same geographic layouts.
- (Or they may be non-redundant or "2x-redundant" with both cables taking the same path. Oops!)
Given this, when I heard that there were two dead patches and that phone service (along with everything else) was out, I figured the dead patches were on rings and that there had to be cuts on two points of each ring to defeat the redundancy.
Now we hear that there were indeed four manholes entered and cables cut in each.
So it sounds to me like the system ALREADY had the redundancy built in - but the attackers knew about it and deliberately made the multiple-location cuts needed to defeat the backups.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why does nobody point out that this man is simply fear mongering? I am sure we all agree that we need to work on further developing and protecting our infrastructure, but this guy writes as if he is talking about Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
Pretty easy to take out public safety trunked systems too. All you need is a hammer and some nails.
In my city the repeaters are on telephone poles. Just punch a hole through the feedline. If the repeater designer knew their shit they'll detect the high SWR an shut down the oscillator and amplifiers. But I can tell you, I've seen lots of gear that has no such SWR protection.
You don't even have to go that far. A little conductive grease, or even water in a connector will also reflect lots of RF power back to the emitter.
It is virtually impossible to protect any given communication medium. You must have several independent means of communication.
They do a lot of war-gaming, but not so much in your backyard as in their own.
Bruce Perens.
Why not complain how the terrorists could go around our country with chainsaws and cut down telephone poles or a sawzall and cut down the high voltage power line towers....
I beg to differ .... What about all the poor people who couldn't share funny pictures of their cats you insensitive clod?!?!?! ;)
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
If by unreported then you mean it was mentioned on NPR, CNN and a local radio station too here in silicon valley, then you're right the media completely missed this one. I guess AT&T isn't getting the news out their with the quarter million dollar reward they've put up for finding the thugs who did it.
I'd take that bet. A significant number of utility outages are caused by people stealing what they hope are large copper wires. There is still a lot of money in copper and these kinds of accidental fiber cuts frequently occur when the thieves can't tell which wires are copper and which are fiber.
Unions have other more effective and more legitimate ways to press their concerns. Of course, I'm sure it's far more entertaining to vilify people who don't kowtow to the corporate line.
..as an 'urban explorer', I'm surprised we've not heard of more situations similar to this, be they of a malicious nature or merely pranks.
It might startle 'regular' people ( but probably not fellow /. readers ) that so much infrastructure is protected simply by obscurity.
Repeat the mantra: security through obscurity is not obscurity.
Pop a telco manhole, and you'll be able to chop anything you want to chop.
Power a power manhole (depending on your city) and plunge the block into darkness.
Run into a metro tunnel, turn off power, switch tracks, redirect trains.
Stroll inside bridges (most bridges are hollow), cut the coms, or do much, much worse.
Pop into hospital utility tunnels, rooftop on buildings that should never have people on them.
The vast amount of infrastructure that is accessible with no effort at all is incredible - and as someone who has not had their hobby interrupted by 9/11 - nothing has changed - not even an iota.
AC for obvious reasons.
You can poison drinking water. LSD is pretty easy to make cheaply, and a single pound of it thrown into a public water system would cause mass navel-gazing and general awesomeness.
FTFY
My hypothesis is that it was a security check done by Homeland Security.
Or maybe a test run for a future false flag attack.
Go back to grazing slashdot, sheeple!
PS: My captcha for this post is "insanity".
"manager"
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
that no one's mentioned Robert Perry's Metzger's Dog.
Were there an unusual number of freeway traffic jams that day? Mercury in the CO switch? 1/4 :-)
I wasn't old enough to have worked on the Y2k stuff, But I'm old enough to remember all the hype, yet a quick read of Wikipedia shows that those countries that took failed to take y2k seriously (Italy, Russia, China ) fared no worse than those that spent billions on it (UK, US, Australia). Your own anecdote is pretty much my point, your entire department worked overtime, got free pizza, snacks, beer, to sit around and do nothing because the you/your higher-ups thought something might go horribly wrong.
I'm not saying that there weren't y2k bugs, just that the entire issue was played up and overhyped, just that y2k simply didn't do enough damage to be ranked up there with malware and cyber attacks
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
And Bruce, my esteemed smart opinionated guy?
It still goes unreported.
There was no journalism in that piece. Just opinion and commentary.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but I agree that some *real* reporting is necessary, and it still is.
So let us, I guess, hope that Wired is on the beat -- since this is their beat -- and I'm sure I'll see something in the next RISKS Digest, as well, if not more than one item.
Indeed, PGN mentions this piece, though it's not as long as I expected from his note.
Would that make them annoyanceists?
Led by Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light?
yes when you cut a phone line, the phone no longer works; brilliant. We have similar problems with our electricity grid. I don't thinking going around cutting wires is going to solve anything. There is only so much you can do to protect society, if people are willing to do anything, even death to get something done, then there really isn't much you can do about it. At some point you have to have a little faith in people.
I guess the Indians and the telegraph was terrorism too huh? Wouldn't that be the actual first Cyber-Attack on America.
-- Vernor Vinge, A Deepness In The Sky.
Always we hear that something should be privatized because private industry is more efficient. Yet never does anyone stop to ask whether efficiency is the only concern.
Thus rather than having a reserve in transmission capacity on our electric grid, since deregulation we simply eat farther and farther into former safety margins. Rather than spend the time to set up proper local mirrors of systems, hospital networks collapse when their Internet connection breaks. It's reasoned that the time-integrated cost of safety margins exceeds the price to be paid when failures they would have prevented occurs.
And so far, they're mostly right. We have a little more latitude for technical failures on Earth than the fictional inhabitants of Namqem. But eventually, as we hop and skip blithely into privatization of core systems, we're going to pay a horrible price for it. It's sad how many innocent lives it's going to take, but no one listened to those calling for improved maritime safety until Titanic sank either.
Since I live in the area where this happened and it was reported extensively on the local news, I noticed *many* errors in TFA, such as :
- Morgan Hill was not specifically targeted .. the cuts were in San Jose and Santa Clara. At most, Morgan Hill was collateral damage.
- Cables were cut in four different locations, so there was no single point of failure.
- Hosting everything at your site might help in cases like this, but is your mail really more reliable if managed by a part-time sysadmin on a single $1000 box, or at Google where they have triple-redundant everything?
unions ARE terrorist organizations. They do more to make someone unemployable than anyone else.
Those you refer to do not comprehend the meaning of "peaceful coexistence". Their brains are either incapable of that line of thinking or are incapable of emotion. They are built that way by nature.
So many times over and over again, those people have been politely respected by everyone else to use peaceful technological progress, but the only reply society gets from them is an intelligent snarky laugh and more plans of world domination.
They are afflicted by a obsessive "control" disorder which is fueled by an insecurity that only animals in the jungle feel.
There's no shortage of animals out there.
The problem begins when educated, secure people bow to the wishes of those insecure rabid beasts and make weapons of mass destruction, chalk up plans of genocide with ordinary weapons, chalk up programs of mass suffering, and many other such ignoble plans and then implement them.
Like the erstwhile British Empire that thrived on traitors from local communities who became soldiers or chiefs, today's politicians, around the world act as treacherous soldiers of the "democratic" empire. I love democracy, but not the hidden oligarchy that is popularly understood to be democracy. True democracy is mass self-governance, not a one-size-fits-all solution for anything.
Given that fact, alongwith some deep pondering and change along the lines of what you state, we need what the parent stated - all men being born free and equal, all men must possess equal knowledge of the latest technology. Only then will a federated structure remain federated and safe.
Single point of control means single point of failure even in government.
Hence the need for independent critics and observers - even like Freeman Dyson - there's an oligopoly/cartel in science too, as in medicine, trade, finance, and "Intellectual Property".
Obama's plan for a renewed economy should concentrate on DIY innovation rather than corporate research.
The time is ripe, and the economy is desperate, and eduction is in great need, for the formal introduction and nurturing of the concept of "Appropriate Technology" into society and the economy.
If not now, when else?
And if not starting with the web, then with what else?
This post is the funniest thing I've seen in the last six months.
Thank you. I feel young again.
Teabaggers?
Heading south on 101 from San Jose Thursday morning, I was on my cell as I usually am. It cut out about 4 miles north of my Morgan Hill exit. I thought it was a dead spot. I got to work and realized we had no phones, no internet, no cell if you were a Verizon or AT&T customer. The only link we had was AM radio (KGO), who told us of the outage. We needed an ETA for restoration of service. How? We drove north until we had cell coverage, and called our respective providers. Neither had a clue. We called our spouses outside the DOS area and they said that cables were cut, but still no ETA. Finally we heard on the AM radio they expected to restore service by end of day. We ended up sending our customer service and order entry people home, and the rest of us worked the internal network or paperwork for the day. The phone came back around 4 PM, but the internet and cells never did until the next day. No 911, all the stores and restaurants were pretty much cash only. It was truly eerie. It was front page news for a couple days but has faded from view since. We think it was almost certainly the union, since the first thing the union did was vehemently deny they had anything to do with it.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
The general populace was terrified
And yet, I thought it was a terrific outcome!
I am a terrorist!
Isn't that close to God's ultimate message to his creation?
"Apologies for the inconvenience"
You cross the universe, face untold challenges and dangers and finally meet God, and THAT is his only message.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
A bit frustrating, you know.
I live in the area and it was on the news for a day and a half. then is was really quiet. Last I heard there was a $250,000 reward leading to the arrest o the person or persons responsible.
/me tips hat
Well done sir, well done
"The more technologically advanced something is, the easier it is to defeat".
Bingo.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Bumpkin: You can take my electrons out of my cold, dead, fingers!
Alien: That will be acceptable!
Alien uses his anode...
Bruce Perens.
No, it was Jack Bauer, but he's not telling and nobody can make him.
They reported the incident. Not the implications. I said the implications were unreported.
Bruce Perens.
Hum, reminds me of "Red Dawn".
Thank goodness these were just VANDALS executing a well coordinated and flawlessly executed act of random senseless destruction and not the work of
some domestic terrorists... could you imagine?
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Clark addresses a similar scenario but the culprits clobber critical cables coming ashore. It isn't fear mongering at all. Bruce is asking some legitimate questions about how these networks are connected. The irony of the historical development of the internet is that one of the initial design intents of packet-switched networks was to provide fail-around connectivity that would permit a communications system to continue to function efficiently even if a significant piece or pieces were chopped out - say through a nuclear strike. The idea has gradually begun to founder under the problem of growing quasi-monopolies that control major pieces of the infrastructure and a cost-driven system that reduces redundancy as a cost savings.
So you talked to the IT department and asked them about their disaster recovery plan ?
... shoot ... an hour ? including travel time.
No ?
The last time I participated in the DR at a hospital, the last set of "tapes" was flown down to the DR center and the system was recovered in
This won't support 100% of the users because the links were lower bandwidth than the local data center but definitely wouldn't shutdown the hospital.
and don't forget the ultimate DR plan - PAPER. You still can get critical care because it's on paper.
This was the mainframe era of the hospital (IBM knows DR) now with the Windows stuff it should work the same but I wouldn't count on it. Lots more machines.
Funniest post on /. ever!
Nope - management was upset that the workers didn't buy into the mandatory "be happy" day with its meetings on being successful and future growth.
Hey, I'm an acidic gooey center with a hard alkaline shell...
melts in your hands, burns all the way down.
this is a wonderful scaremongers dream, how come it hasn't been reported that every one from quakers to baboons did it ? seems very odd that any act of terrorism would go un reported in us press
I don't think we have a word mildinconvenienceists.
The word you are searching for is punks, or perhaps goddamn punks if they cause more monetary damage.
Bearing in mind that Bush is responsible for having citizens on my nation (UK) kidnapped off our own streets (admittedly while our own government looked the other way :/) and torturing them (torture including but not limited to, electrocution, water-boarding and cutting of genitals).
Dunno about you but that terrifies the shit out of me... especially since the guy was charged with anything in the end. It really could be any of us next.
I have some inside information about this. Apparently it was perpetrated by members of a union who's contract was coming back up for negotiation. Either they weren't getting what they wanted, or they decided to make it known how important they are, etc.
Well, if we're going to go skipping down the tin foil hat road, you may as well consider the possibility of the company doing this in an effort to put bad publicity on the unions.
Though, either of the scenarios are about equally likely.
I can understand a union worker cutting the lines AFTER or DURING a strike as it would tend to cause the most disruption. A "this is why you need us" point of view if you will. Doing so beforehand makes absolutely no sense at all.
I WAS old enough to work on the Y2K stuff, and it WAS a potentially serious issue. Granted, it was VASTLY overhyped. Planes didn't fall from the sky, cars didn't explode, life didn't end, but there could have been some nasty and costly glitches if we hadn't fixed the problems. And, I'd guess that the reason the countries that ignored Y2K weren't visibly affected is that they were already crappy with their computers & financial systems, so the extra Y2K problems got lost in the existing chaos.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Wanna-be terrorists... werrorists.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Terrorist acts need not generate terror.
But they need to at least TRY to cause terror. In fact, motivation is the whole key to the thing. A tanker truck exploding on a highway after an accidental rollover may very well cause terror, but is still not terrorism.
These guys clipped some fiber... that is plain old ordinary sabotage, as you said. Even with an ideological or (more likely) financial motive, it just becomes extortion of some kind - still not terror unless they thought that cutting the fiber would cause some kind of panic... not likely! :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
One can be surprisingly skinny when was is obsessed with one's work. Fat geeks are a stereotype.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I was talking about this one: "The AAG cable's western terminus will be in Mersing. It will run from there through major landing points in Lantau in Hong Kong, Currimao in the Philippines, and Hawaii to its eastern terminus in San Luis Obispo, California."
It came up in discussion threads after the massive indian internet disruption in late 2008.
Of course that's 7 internet years since then so possibly new cables exist.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
he's the loser who used to crapflood Adequacy all the time. Why slashdot posted an article by this crapflooding loser is beyond me.
I don't think Civil War re-creations really help us plan for redundant Internet/communications infrastructure...
Apparently they have speculative war games. I was invited to one to drive the theorization regarding Open Source, and unfortunately had to decline.
Bruce Perens.
There is a difference between a terrorist and a saboteur.
Recall that much of the cost in our health care system is due to two factors: litigation and greed. Doctors pay a ridiculous amount on insurance in the hopes that they won't go bankrupt if someone decides to sue, and pharmaceutical companies want money.
Socializing the US health care system won't fix much. Tort reform will.
He who has no
Someone needs to refresh their definitions of "cyber"... cutting physical fibers is a much of a "cyber" attack as farting in an airport bathroom is a plane hijacking. Kudos on the attempt to make an eye-catching headline, but that's just it... Fibers get cut all the time, just a few months ago the sub-oceanic fibers were cut repeatedly, severing connection to entire continents... who cares about vandalism in a tiny settlement?
That was a proposed cable back then; I'm not sure about its current status, since the main reach.com website doesn't seem to have been updated in a while and most of the articles I could find on the web about AAG were a couple of years old and in the future tense, though at least some segment of it was deployed in the Philippines in May 2008. Most new submarine cables talk about having huge bandwidth, though in most cases that's potential bandwidth if you light up all the possible wavelengths at the highest speeds they'll support, and what's actually deployed at first is a fraction of that.
On the other hand, many cable systems are being deployed with some redundancy, either in the cable system itself or redundant with other cables owned by the same company. India seems to have been a special case - at least as of a couple of years ago, the big bottlenecks weren't the undersea cables themselves, but the landing facilities and the land connections from them to the big cities, where you had to deal with the not-dead-yet ex-monopoly telcos, either to get landline bandwidth or to pay through the nose for using it. Competition may have forced them to finish liberalizing by now; it's been a while since I checked.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks