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FBI Investigating Series of Fiber Cuts In San Francisco Bay Area
jfruh writes: Ten times over four separate nights in the past year, telecom cables have been mysteriously cut in various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area. Now the FBI is investigating the incidents as potential sabotage. ITWorld reports: "In the past year, there were 10 instances on four separate nights when telecom cables were intentionally cut in Fremont, Walnut Creek, Alamo, Berkeley and San Jose, the agency said Monday. FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich said it's unclear if the incidents are unrelated or the work of a single person or group, but the FBI is keen to hear from anyone who may have witnessed anything suspicious."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08...
I guess it was a power substation, not a fiber optic link, but it was kind of in the same area.
Could it be to hide placing fiber taps in the trunk? Not normally a tin foil hat guy. But, you have to wonder.
That occurred to me also. Great cover since a break in one place left broken can cover for a tap installed somewhere else including the slight difference in signal level chalked up to a mediocre splice done in the heat of the moment...
Maybe, but unlikely. There are some pretty dumb copper thieves out there (the really dumb ones mostly get electrocuted when they try and steal live power cables) and it used to be quite common when fibre wasn't quite so common when they'd mistake fibre for copper - especially if was secured to containment and they couldn't judge the weight without cutting it first - but most of them now seem to have figured out how to tell the difference visually.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
In the wake of Snowden, they are preventing the most obvious proof they were spying on their own country from within it's own borders.
Infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable.
Some big problems:
1. It is distributed all over the place, often just hanging on poles or with little protection beyond a fence.
2. Cost-efficiency often results in minimal redundancy.
3. Cost-efficiency often results in minimal inventory of spares and capacity to make repairs.
Take out a couple of big transformers with a rifle and you could cut power over a very large area with a very lengthy repair time. Take out a fair number of them and you'll exhaust the supply of spares and now you could be talking months of problems (perhaps cannibalizing from other sites at reduced capacity across the grid, and if you take out enough you might just have to leave large areas blacked/browned-out).
Fiber is also difficult to repair. If you had a determined attack you could probably rapidly outpace the ability to locate and repair cuts.
Of course any kind of serious or sustained attack would draw attention and you'd find security improved. However, you could probably do a lot of damage before that happened.
I think the best solution is to build more redundancy into infrastructure, and more capacity for repair. That also makes infrastructure more robust against other kinds of failure. It does cost money, and when you have privatization it requires some kind of way to pay those costs. The government could just buy capacity that it can make available in the event of a disaster. Of course, that would need to be real capacity, and not something that just gets oversubscribed (government buys 1GW of power but doesn't use it, utility just under-provisions by 1GW and sends the government the bill).
The last set of cuts the repair was delayed 8 hours while the FBI investigated. They would not let techs in to repair the damage. I know I was on a conference line waiting for updates and several big companies were also on the line apple for one.