Food for thought: Could an analyst, looking at outage reports over a period of time, build a schematic that would demonstrate that if you took out n points, you'd kill x% of data traffic in and out of $pickyourmetropolitanarea?
If this analyst were working for Bin Ladin....
Yes an analyst could do this. Our job is to make sure that he can't get a very large x% without also requiring a large investment in n attack points. Consider bin Laden's organization in 2000. They had a plan to commandeer 10 airliners and attack 10 targets in the USA including things like the CIA headquarters. Resource constraints caused them to back off to 4 targets. We already win because the targets are not all in the same city block. Next, the attack day arrived and the 4 teams went to work. But only two of them achieved 100% objective. One team failed entirely when they lost control of their weapon. And the third team hit a glancing blow to the target that damaged less than a fifth of the building. And it turned out that they hit a less critical part of the Pentagon as well. This is a typical result of a military or terrorist operation. It is very hard to plan and execute 100% effective coordinated attacks against a large number of targets. On 9/11 the terrorists had no problem making 4 big booms and getting attention. But they missed the Whitehouse entirely and only did minor damage to the military headquarters. Remember, that packet switched networking originated with the desire to build a telecom network that could survive massive destruction on the scale of a nuclear war, but continue to function. If we apply that kind of thinking to planning network deployment then there should be little extra risk from terrorist knowing where the vulnerable points are. Spread the risk by spreading the vulnerable points.
Some ad hoc terrorists, in a country crawling with US troops, with a communications infrastructure nowhere as advanced as the USA just managed to coordinate a multiple bomb attack simultaneously.
Iraq currently has a cellphone network that is more advanced than the USA, i.e. it's all GSM. But in fact, all they really needed to pull this off was a quiet pub and some accurate watches that could be synchronized prior to the attacks. Better go back and watch those old spy movies again... --Michael Dillon