Slashdot Mirror
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."
Fiber cuts?
Listen, putz:
Keep it smooth,
Or door she shuts.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Could it be to hide placing fiber taps in the trunk? Not normally a tin foil hat guy. But, you have to wonder.
Nope. Fiber optic, not copper comm lines, so this incident cannot be ascribed to greed rather than mischief.
This is an anecdote and I don't have any evidence to back it up but I know that copper theft is very common here (as it is in most of the US). A phone company guy once told me that they've started labeling the fiber to indicate that there is no copper so that copper thieves don't rip out a half a mile of the stuff only to realize it's useless to them.
Jesus. Good, hard-working, honest Americans are sitting at home, fapping to online porn, pirating movies and music, trolling n00bs, and some sick, twisted psychopath cuts their fiber. Some things...some things are just beyond the pale.
Nail 'em, FBI. Nail 'em to the fucking wall.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Not removing - adding.
They'll break a fibre in two places - one 'obvious' and the other not so much. It depends what detection the owner can do as to where 'obvious' might be. While the owner is detecting the problem, isolating where it is on the fibre and sending out crews to fix it, the tap is applied in the second location, along with suitable repairs and whatnot.
When the 'obvious' break is repaired, the owner just sees the light going down the fibre once again - they're not aware there's a tap. Indeed, if the tap consumes a little bit of light, forcing a recalibration at either end, it'll be attributed to the repair made at the 'obvious' break, and not the addition of the tap.
Sadly, I'm pretty sure we'll never know which one of us is right about this particular point though.
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).
Oh, I don't know. If I saw a Comcast worker actually fixing something, that would be pretty memorable.
Have gnu, will travel.
Can you imagine crime in Alaska: "what were you doing in the night from november 1st to february 15th ?"
Non-Linux Penguins ?