Preparing for the Worst in IT

mplex writes "How vulnerable is the internet to terrorist attack? Is it robust enough to handle an outage on a massive scale? Should the commercial infrastructure that powers the internet be kept secret? These are the sorts of questions raised by Mark Gibbs in his latest column in Network World. 'There is an alternate route available for nearly all services through Las Vegas or Northern California serving all facilities-based carriers in Los Angeles -- all interconnected at numerous L.A. and L.A.-area fiber-optic terminals supporting both metro and long-distance cable.' Given that the internet thrives on open networks, it's hard to imagine keeping them a secret. At best, we must be prepared to deal with the worst."

good link

[normuser]

here is a good link for the lazy http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/041607 backspin.html [networkworld.com]

Re:Already UNDER ATTACK

[Darlantan]

In the original model, yes.

Nowdays? No. The internet isn't as robust as it used to be, because real redundancy costs a lot of cash. There are single buildings that could be hit that would cripple internet connectivity to entire regions, or at the very best reduce traffic to a near standstill. It's far from nuke-proof these days, nor is it very terror-proof.

Having said that, I think terrorism isn't the big threat here. Earthquakes, hurricanes, and flooding are more pressing concerns. It is a certainty that one of them will do severe damage to a US city at some point in the future, and those sort of events do much more than take down a single building. Fiber cuts, power interruption, etc.

Re:Dear Zonk

[jamie]

There is already a tag which our software recognizes as indicating a typo in an article. It's 'typo'. This is in the FAQ [slashdot.org]. If you want to get the attention of the editor on duty, use the 'typo' tag.

Taiwan Earthquake DID break the Internet

[cpaglee]

The premise of Internet interuption is probably much more likely to occur as a result of natural disasters. A serious earthquake near Taiwan on Dec. 27th 2006 DID shut down most of the Internet for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6211451.st m [bbc.co.uk] I was IN China at the time and it was ... horrible. The major telcos in Beijing, China Netcom, was not so great at recovering from it. China Telecom in Shanghai did a much better job. Japan, Korea and Taiwan recovered much quicker because their ISPs were willing to spend money on alternate Internet paths via satellite. China Netcom was just too cheap and screwed over their customers. The Internet never actually went completely down, but you were not able to surf the Internet. Email was problematic, but IM and VoIP still worked. Most of the problem was that port 80 requests far exceeded the available bandwidth, so everything just ground to a hault. MSN and Skype still worked like a charm. I had friends IM me web page content so that I could 'surf' pages I desperately needed to read. I also used proxies in Australia to gain access to the USA Internet and this worked quite well. I think the idea of a terrorist organization trying to bring down Internet infrastructure is completely ludicrous. Terrorists want to take lives, and bringing down the Internet is not going to take (that many) lives. This is just another sad example of the sorry state of paranoya we live in under the Bush administration post 911. Just as there will NEVER be another successful hijacking of an airplane in the USA again, not because of the stupid security we have to go through at airports, but because normal every day airplane passengers will kill the terrorists rather than let terrorists take over an airplane again, ever. We do NOT need to worry about things that will never happen, and terrorists trying to shut down the Internet by blowing up infrastructure? It is just NOT going to happen. A bomb would be better used where there is a high concentration of people. Maybe the Internet will be compromised through a virus or malware or bots - these are things we should worry about, but NEVER by physical force. We really need to STOP giving attention to these fear mongers who promote these stupid ideas.

Re:What about a boogeyman attack?

[Ontology42]

As a consultant I routinely receive requests for Disaster Recovery work for organizations ranging in size from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. Depending on the alloted budget we work our way down the hardware.
1. Redundant Network Connections
2. Highly available Services (Applicaiton Clusters)
3. Fail over - Off site if needed (Local, Metro, then off-site)
4. Power backup & Isolation (Generators good for 48 hours at least if not more, plus filtration systems that will withstand a localized EMP)
5. Testing - Smoking hole scenarios. (ie: where did NY, Chicogo, Washington, just go?)

I am not at liberty to divulge my client list but I can say for certain that they are very interested in maintaining service availability even if their primary sites were hit directly by nuclear weapons. Services include all communications not just the internet. Arpanet was founded by the boys in green, they worry about these sorts of things.
It becomes a matter of balanceing function with cost, the old engineering addage does ring true here more than anywhere else:
Cheap, Fast, Reliable; pick any two!

Companies like Hugues, Teleglobe, and various governments of the G8 do what their budgets allow to facilitate redundancy, however since terrorism is a good political tool to motivate sales (along with natural disasters) then people in the consulting industry will be well met to help the organizations that make the internet redundant.
As for the power grid, Telcordia standards dictate that a carrier grade data center (if it's essential services) has to have some method of running even at a reduced capacity for extended periods of time. Thus there is a buffer provided for the local power company to get their systems working, that and most datacentres are close to large power supplies. This is the result of the original POTS standards. It's also the reason VOIP providers don't guarantee 911 service. The regulation and maintence costs on these datacenters is very high, which is how AT&T and Verizon justify charging an arm and a leg for your land line.
Then again, I've seen Tier 1 data-centerers undone by a fire-systems worker (plumber) dropping a wrench on the -48V bus-bar and having instantaneously weld to the A-Frame causing millions in damage and making an entire city core go quiet. Who needs terrorists when we have difficulty hitting 100% availability on our own, normally?

How do you figure?

[briancnorton]

The power grid is fragile? On the US's three major grids (west, east, and texas) We've had something like two major outages (65 and 03) in the last 100 years not caused by natural disaster. The power grid SEEMS to be very reliable, fault tolerant, and capable of containing most major problems to a small area. Even the litany of small power outages that occur every day somewhere are repaired promptly.

Re:What about a boogeyman attack?

[myowntrueself]

trying to set off real shoe bombs on an actual airplane?

By 'real shoe bombs' you mean 'shoe bombs that would actually detonate'?

Ie unlike the "shoe bombs" deployed by Richard Reid... Which were actually fake shoe bombs?

The fake shoe bombs in question were plastic explosives which he 'attempted' to detonate using *matches*. There was never a threat to the aircraft or its passengers.

These 'devices' would not have detonated and were fake bombs.

If I knew someone who had sat next to this guy on this flight, no I would not be insisting that people take off their shoes to get on an airplane.

a sane view from the clouds

[tadauphoenix]

This is immensely overblown. I happen to directly oversee multiple nationwide optical networks of varying layers (1-4) with roughly a half terabit of real data capacity at my fingertips. Situations that could be considered OMG CATASTROPHIC occur semi-frequently, sometimes a few in a day, sometimes a couple weeks without. What most people don't understand is that there are long haul optics hanging right over their head carrying ~96 or more fibers, DWDM OC-192 (10G/s, so that's almost 2Tb capacity right there) that you could shoot down with your remington. And this happens. Or a power failure at a pop. Every time I pass a digging crew on the road, first thought "call before you dig m-f's!".

But terrorism against colo's, pop's, nap's, etc...? As part of network design, you have to take into account catastrophic failure(s). That means if a hurricane could tear through an area with a big colo/pop/nap presence (say atlanta), one's network better be prepared to handle the shift in traffic in case the worst does happen - like a second simultaneous failure elsewhere. It'll hurt, but as they say on the battlefield, acceptable casualties.

Bringing The Internet down by means of physical terrorist attacks is very unlikely (speaking modestly). Example: the verizon colo in the WTC buildings. That was a mess, but it was handleable. Peering and routing changes, move on. Taking down a physical point of presence would require some intense research and much more importantly DESIRE. This is the basic concept of hacking, given time and motivation, there's nothing that can't be toppled. So, take off your sweatin'-it pants, and chill. Do we really need any more paranoia at this point?

Re:What about a boogeyman attack?

[mikael]

High-voltage transmission lines are frequently in the middle of nowhere, with no patrollers or police nearby, yet easily accessible from any SUV by just driving down the service road. A single stick of dynamite is probably sufficient to take down a single tower.

A single lightning strike or solar storm is also capable of disabling an entire line, not forgetting tornados
or heavy snow which can also bring the cables. And the same lightning strike can also take out telephone lines.

Greatest challenge for internet security...

[BlueParrot]

...must be to stop having 90% of desktop users on a series of operating systems for which the vendor has repeatedly failed miserably at adressing numerous vulnerabilities, causing widespread sabbotage, phishing and data theft costing god knows how much money every year. I mean seriously, can anyone actually come up with anything a terrorist organisation could pull off which is going to have a worse impact on the nets general stability security and performance than Microsoft windows? This is not even taking into consideration the cost of the hardware required to run a system which has between twice to four times the system requirements of the main competition, their repeated efforts to keep other companies of the market, or continued and deliberate breakage of APIs, standards and backwards compatability. I would seriously argue that at least as far as the internet is concerned, Microsoft is a MUCH greater problem than any terrorist organisation will ever be.