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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."
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.
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)
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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
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.
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.