Sean, This is a question of hierarchy of risk and scarce resource allocation. Fiber infrastructure is relatively well protected (by the ground), hard to damage (requires big machines), and has service restoration capabilities (routing protocols, optical ring protection, et al). A large scale (regional) telecom network outage is a big deal and can be economically devastating. However, its tough to pull off, and, more importantly, it takes time to do the damage. Walking into a Boston/NY/Chicago subway station with a vest packed with c4 at rush hour, is another ball of wax. Its easier to pull of 10 simultaneous suicide attacks against public transit than it is to induce a major regional telecom outage through fiber cuts, IMHO. If I was a terrorist, I'd rather try to take out points of fiber concentration, and my tool would not be a backhoe. I won't elaborate, but I think most folks can figure out a few modalities of attack. Too many people know where those points of concentration are and how to crack them open. I don't think restricting government information is going to help much. Scarce DHS resources should be applied elsewhere. - Dan On 1/19/06 1:00 PM, "sgorman1@gmu.edu" <sgorman1@gmu.edu> wrote:
While it is always fun to call the government stupid, or anyone else for that matter, there is a little more to the story.
- For one you do not need a backhoe to cut fiber - Two, fiber carries a lot more than Internet traffic - cell phone, 911, financial tranactions, etc. etc. - Three, while it is very unlikely terrorists would only attack telecom infrastructure, a case can be made for a telecom attack that amplifies a primary conventional attack. The loss of communications would complicate things quite a bit.
I'll agree it is very far fethced you could hatch an attack plan from FCC outage reports, but I would not call worrying about attacks on telecommunications infrastructure stupid. Enough sobriety though, please return to the flaming.
----- Original Message ----- From: Joe Maimon <jmaimon@ttec.com> Date: Thursday, January 19, 2006 12:01 pm Subject: Re: The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat?
Dennis Dayman wrote:
"In 2004, Department of Homeland Security officials became fearful that terrorists might start using accidental dig-ups as a road map for deliberate attacks, and convinced the FCC to begin locking up previously public data on outages. In a commission filing, DHS argued successfully that revealing the details..."
--MORE--
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,70040-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
-Dennis
This is really stupid. Assuming the terrorist actually have the dozens of backhoes needed to completely erase meaningfull internet connectivity in north america, they would probably prefer to use them to smash cars and kill people on the interstate highways or something.
Terrorist inflict terror by killing people, not by forcing internet explorer to display "page cannot be displayed".
Let us not assume that murderous terrorist are as dumb as people in DHS.