San Francisco Internet Cuts: Was Someone Testing the System?
By Susie Madrak Monday Apr 13, 2009 12:00pmI noticed this last week, because my internet access was unusually slow. I wondered then what was going on and finally read about the Bay Area cuts. This additional perspective isn't all that reassuring:
There may be more security issues than ever with a so-called smart grid controlling power distribution in the country.
The real likelihood that hackers can break into such a grid is actually not a possibility, but an inevitability. What is always overlooked when these fancy initiatives are unveiled is the nature of the Internet.
What we need is a distribution system that relies on computer technology for management, but which is completely off the Net itself. Nobody wants to do that.
It is crazy to put all of our eggs in one Internet basket, as the telecommunications scene worldwide is subject to too much hacking. Even a non-Internet network cannot be secured.
This problem goes further than hackers online -- it goes to our overdependence on interconnectivity through common connections.
This week in the San Francisco Bay Area, the fiber-optic cable network was purposely sliced at four distinct locations. Where a hacker cannot succeed, bolt cutters will do.
[...] Once the cables were cut, Internet service was flaky for the region and completely out for 50,000 customers. On top of that, the landlines would not work and the cell-phone towers in the area went dead.
Does anyone find this sort of interdependency a little disconcerting? It is as if someone was testing the grid for either redundancy or failure points.
Much of the problem stems from the issues with technologies such as fiber optics. They require a level of public trust to work, because the cables must be clearly marked to prevent public works and contractors from accidentally cutting them.
In most parts of the country, there are signs up and down highways, across bodies of water and even in cities marking the location of a fiber-optic line. There are even maps of these things and where they are located.
How much work would it take to find some choke points that you could cut for the purposes of disrupting data communications in an area? How would this affect the so-called smart grid?
The peculiar nature of the four cuts around the Bay Area indicated to me that someone was mapping how they would affect the region, keeping in mind that by cutting the cable in key areas you might be able to take down half the country. If more cuts are made in the future, then someone is trying to reverse-engineer the network to find the most vulnerable points of disruption.
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World of the FUTURE!
Westworld was better but in either case, you'd better watch your back when that Yul Brynner character comes around.
The fiber cuts happened just days after AT&T's contract with its union expired. The cuts themselves where "clean" and easily repaired. This whole scenario looks like someone who wanted to get management's attention; and they did.
There is still an need to secure the infrastructure and make it redundant. But it will always be difficult to protect against inside jobs perpetrated by those with both specific knowledge and an axe to grind.
Making claims like 'it must have been the union guys' is garbage.
Who would have to fix it? The same union guys you're blaming.
What would that do at the negotiating table? Completely destroy the union position.
Take a look at the media coverage - it's just like your nonsense allegation, using the word 'sabotage' and implying union workers are the villains. How does that help them? It doesn't.
These are the same union workers who conducted a peaceful informational picket at AT&T park on opening day.
BTW, my wife works for AT&T (accounting) and would have to relocate for a strike assignment if that happens. Me, I'm a union guy (not CWA), and I think it's IRRESPSONSIBLE to make allegations of insider involvement without proof.
The San Francisco Chronicle already discredited that theory about the unions being behind this. Others thought it might have been scabs that had worked for AT&T, but that theory was also thin on evidence, although not entirely ruled out.
These people had to lift manwhole covers. That is a pretty heavy task, along with not being noticed doing it.
In any event, it is a tragedy and I am glad someone is finally reporting on it. Thanks C&L.
Who's to say it wasn't management doing it to discredit the CWA and weaken their position at the bargaining table?
But I gotta say, other than I can't 'Cui Bono' Mz. Mandrake's thoughts, her takes on it are insightful as hell, pattern wise.
Probing, testing. But leaving it easily repaired . . .
Cui bono, management/union issues aside?
Are there project fundings being pushed by anyone?
Someone selling security apparatus?
A federal and state investment funding at risk, being leveraged?
Communications redevelopment projects out there?
just wait until the sun spits out a flare large enough to wipe out everything electrical. get used to it. it will happen within the next four years.
Well, we don't actually know the Sun's plans. We know of one such incident since the development of the first communication grids (telegraph.) The one incident is not statistically significant.
Still, should it happen again soon, it's pretty likely tens of millions of Americans will die, of starvation and disease. (It could take a year to rebuild the electrical grid after such a flare.) Nothing to sniff at, I guess.
Nature is going to get us in the end. We like to think we are masters of the planet, and that's pretty funny, and just plain untrue.
We should wipe it out, like all those solar terrorists.
/snark
And...we've got Gingrich and his giant secret decoder ring link to his magnet-maximus to add to our worries on top of solar flares.
You got some evidence for that, or are you just jacking off to that 2012 shit? Anyhow, in order to cause that kind of damage, it would have to produce electrical fields on the order of hundreds of kV/m everywhere on Earth's surface (including the nightside at the time of the event). And if you want anyone to find that possibility credible, you'd better come up with something more useful than a bald assertion.
G. Gordon Liddy actually wrote a very interesting small piece on this sort of thing that was published back in 1982 in Omni Magazine. It detailed 10 "most vulnerable points" in America for attackers, and I remember in particular his mentioning that most of America's electricity travels through 10 gigantic stations that were surrounded by nothing more than barbed wire and cyclone fences, and how easy it would be to simultaneously attack them. He said that water, phone, etc. grids all over the US were said up for maximum efficiency and that made them very vulnerable.
I'm not a Liddy fan, but I remember thinking that it was important for more people to start being paranoid like that, if what he were saying was true.
But to be honest, I would bet that those stations and similar points are under a lot more security after 9/11.
Read all the requirements (standards) of electric companies. Pay attention to the CIP or cyber security standards.
If electric companies cannot prove they are in compliance, they can be fined millions of dollars DAILY until they become compliant.
I can't help but wonder if this is related to the Russian/Chinese electrical grid spies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nor...
These cuts were made manually, by lifting manhole covers, going underground and actually cutting the lines.
The Russian/Chinese thing is completely different. I know, at first I thought that too. Go to the San Francisco Chronicle - they have more details.
Some in the Bay Area had a common reaction to the incident: someone didn't want a particular and specific phone call being made that would "bust them" for something they didn't want known....we all know some people's priorities usually negate the safety and well-being of the masses.
There are many cables of many companies that are literally lying on the surface and/or inches below the surfaces all over the bay area. There have been endless incidents of kids deliberately cutting them and/or cars driving on and over them that have disrupted services of various companies over the last several years.
Hopefully it was something like that... good to point out the fallacies of the system now though.
Yep. Set up the shortwave net, now before it's too late. haha
I keep meaning to get into Ham Radio but never seem to find the time.
... the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League). They have a book, "Now You're Talking!" that is designed to get the newcomer versed in the basics and through their non-Morse test.
what type of glaze do you prefer?
there are amateur radio internet repeaters.
"The internet" was built to be inherently redundant in case of a pesky nuclear war. This topic is more akin to the "fiber to the home" issue. If somebody cuts your telephone line and you don't have sat or neighborhood wireless, obviously who can't participate in that redundant system. Seems like this might be a test of finding and cutting the largest possible non-redundant branches. If four cuts got 50,000 people off telecom, that sounds "promising" but 50,000 is what percentage of the "Bay area?" And how much research went into finding those four points is probably the question for accessing terrorism risk.
...internet voting, dunnit?
They're so nice..
going to blame Obama for the internet drops?
This had NOTHING to do with the power grid. This was fiber optic lines relating to communication (and is rumored to have been done by a disgruntled employee).
This is pure "What If" and "coulda" by the author and, as usual, by Susie.
EDIT: This was supposed to be a reply to jadenton on Disgruntled Employees.
the russians, err the Somalians, err the libruls are coming.
We can hope this disgruntled employee has a disgruntled spouse and or friend he/she has bragged their deed to.
There's $250,000 reward in place for that disgruntled person to tattle on the disgruntled employee. Particularly in these times, that's quite a chunk o' cash to test one's loyalties to the nasty one who left tens of thousands to fend for themselves in emergency situations.
Might point out that thousands of businesses who cannot afford any more loss of business must have been totally screwed too without phone and net services.
were they all cut at the same time or was there traveling distance time between the four cuts.
This makes a difference on the number of people involved.
You're going to drum SUSIE for playing "What if?" when you've got absolutely no proof this was criminal activity on the part of an employee?
God, that's just laughable.
*I* qualified it as rumor (see the word 'rumor' up there?) Susie was just doing her typical shit (her posts are often just like this...and are often shown wrong within weeks).
One reason I almost never read her posts. They are not credible.
This one is typical of her 'reporting' which is a huge what if.
She should qualify her stuff; notice I did.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/...
Thank you.
This is why I never got rid of my CB radio. In other countries you will find more CB's than Telephones.
Regardless of teh internet's current fragility, you'll be needing that CB when Skynet becomes self-aware.
The access points and the very tools needed to break into the casing where the cables are kept are specifically for use only by employees with the matching tools.
The thinking that this might have been a union response seems plausible to me. If not, I still think it couldn't have been an outsider.
I'd like to see domestic terrorism actions against whomever gets fingered; people across hundreds of square miles being made incapable of contacting emergency services is a HUGE deal, in my opinion.
"Disgruntled union employee" is irresponsible conjecture.
I keep hearing how "only an employee" could have access. Really? Nobody breaks into trucks labelled AT&T at all? There's no way to open a manhole or a junction box without 'the right tools'?
Are the keys limited and accessible only to specific crews, or is the box fitted with a generic key that countless employees in the Bay Area have on their keyring?
However, I agree wholeheartedly with your opinion about prosecution/punishment, no matter who it is.
them big bad unions are something to be feared, as told by the corporate press...sheesh
As a current AT&T employee I can tell you that our vehicles do get broken into. And the tools and equipment that is stolen can usually be found at your local pawn shops. I know this from experience. So do not assume that only AT&T employees have the means by which to do these things. And could it be that someone wanted to perpetrate some kind of crime in the area. In the movies they always show the burglars going after the phone and alarm system first. I do agree whoever is responsible needs to be punished. Do not throw union people under the bus without proof. Otherwise you only sound like you are union bashing.
... and yet the big bad unions managed to pull this off?
Rabbit indeed...
there were non-union workers who also had access
1) Common locks are pretty easy to pick -- try entering 'lockpicking' into YouTube and take a look at all the how-tos that come up. Lockpicking isn't that uncommon a skill these days.
2) There is no hand tool that cannot be acquired or duplicated well enough for a single night of mischief with a relatively small amount of effort.
3) AT&T doesn't secure its trucks any better than ordinary vehicles -- I've seen people drive them home and park them in front of their houses.
to get the internet off of the electrical grid when Broadband over Power Lines makes them one in the same
multiple cuts almost simultaneously in the Mediterranean
Hummm....Santa Cruz County was completely dark. We had no Internet, no cell, long distance or 911. It sucked.
Satellite phone was our only link with the outside world on the "dark day".
I guess AT&T went cheap-o on the redundant concept.
Did this affect Verizon users, too? What about those with a land line? Did those people (with wired in old-fashioned phones) lose service, too?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/...
My understanding is that there were other companies impacted, but that AT&T were the hardest hit.
Many of us in the affected area felt this went under-reported. ALL Internet, landline and cellular phone systems were down for about 200k to 300k people. If you had Comcast for phone and internet you were not affected.
In addition, no ATMs, cash only for gas, and most banks closed their doors. BofA was letting 1 person in at a time if they new their acct. #, and they could tax a max $100 dollar withdrawl. Frankly, the reprecussions gave us quite a pause. You can read more at santacruzsentinel.com
real journalists and real news organizations, they probably would have
reported this in detail. However, all these silly posers are busy with the tea-bagging, etc.
Yes, everyone lost all contact with the outside world...I understand cell was down everywhere. I could make local calls on a land line but not outside of 831.
Media has neglected to mention how cut off Santa Cruz was.
A big chunk of San Benito and Santa Clara counties were cut off too. A section of Silly Valley was sans connectivity. I am thinking the damage was in the tens if not hundreds of millions.
But not a peep... I guess imaginary threats are far more important than real calamities/issues for the press.
Many individuals find comfort in "HAM RADIOS".
What do either John C. Dvorak or Thomas Kostigen who wrote these scary camp fire stories know? They are journalists. I've worked in IT for a long time, at 2 telco's, and currently I comply with DISA/DoD security.
The power grid story is a load, the government quietly helps companies improve security. Further where national security is a concern companies must comply with DISA/DoD standards and are held accountable through IT audits such as SAS70 or SOX where the controls are dictated by the government.
It's more likely the original story was a ruse to get cyber crackers to come and try to break in, a news media honey pot if you will. That way should anyone arrive for the challenge the government can track who is attempting to gain access.
See for yourself peruse the Gov's stigs
http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/checklist/
First, as I have pointed out elsewhere, there is NO evidence to suggest the 'power grid has been hacked' -- rather the stories floated are fear mongering designed to force a political change in network oversite. Second, last week's fiber cuts may have been the work or copper thieves (who have mistakenly cut fiber in the past) or is may have been out and out vandalism. At this point it is hard to say; however, it seems very unlikely the craft workers at AT&T had anything to do with it. The real question is why AT&T -- who made a $29bn profit last year -- didn;t have a redundant fiber path between such critical locations. This is the real problem -- not vandalism -- but cheapskate network design which created such a single point of failure.
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