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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."
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?
I guess this kinda puts a damper on all the cloud computing hype of late...
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)