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Thousands of ATMs Go Down in Indonesia After Satellite Problems (reuters.com)
Thousands of ATMs and electronic card payment machines in Indonesia went offline over the weekend, and it might take two more weeks before full service is restored, after an outage from a satellite belonging to state-controlled telecom giant PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom). From a report: Around 15,000 ground sites across Indonesia were affected by the problem on the 'Telkom-1' satellite, whose service is used by government agencies, banks, broadcasters and other corporations, Telkom's president director Alex Sinaga told reporters on Monday. A shift in the direction of the satelliteâ(TM)s antenna, which was first detected last Friday, had disrupted connectivity. Bank Central Asia (BCA), Indonesia's largest bank by market value, had around 5,700 of its ATMs affected by the outage, or 30 percent of the total operated by the bank, BCA chief executive Jahja Setiaatmadja told reporters. The Internet connection in some remote BCA branches were also affected, he said.
As someone who was in the satellite industry for nearly a decade... But the reality is that very little North American, or European traffic goes out over satellite. Yes, gas stations and so forth are all equipped with antennas (look for them sometime, you'll see a hughesnet dish). This is primarily backup these days.
However, the thing you need to know is that satellites have no security to them, they're just dumb bent-pipe repeaters. All that that someone needs to do to disrupt them is broadcast enough RF energy on the right frequency to drop the signal to noise ratio beyond what can be recovered.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
As we become more and more dependent on technology, we introduce what is tantamount to a single point of failure: electronics. If a terror cell were to detonate several well-placed electromagnetic pulse weapons, we literally turn the clock back over a hundred years. An EMP is significantly easier and cheaper to build, disguise, and ship. Maybe it would not even take that ... maybe all it will take is a cybercriminal to gain access to critical computing systems while government and industry is busy blaming each other, posturing, and threatening. Imagine if a cyberterrorist gained access to critical control systems at several nuclear power generation plants, disabling the safety systems, and stopping the water cooling system. The resulting explosion would make Chernobyl look like a camp fire by comparison. The delivery of nuclear weapon is rapidly becoming too expensive and complicated when there are cheaper options that could be just as effective. It would even be safer for the cyberterrorist because his tracks would be covered by proxy as a result of the ensuing chaos.