A Cyber-Attack On an American City

Bruce Perens writes "Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes in the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. So I decided to change that."

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Hams

[pete-classic]

Jesus. Here come four thousand posts about how awesome hams are, and how Internet over power cables sucks, etc.

My Dad was a ham. Yes, hams are awesome. In their nutty little useful-once-in-a-lifetime, semi-Luddite way.

We love you, hams. We're glad you're out there. But please, seriously, shut the fuck up. On the Internet. Feel free to blather on your radios.

-Peter

Re:Hams

[Red Flayer]

My Dad was a ham.

He was delicious.

Yes, hams are awesome.

I concur. Especially with eggs. Or spiced and pressed into a can.

Re:Hams FTW

[Maserati]

"Morris code" implies Morse Dancing. Which added a little hilarity to my afternoon.

Re:Cables were cut in San Jose and San Carlos

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt many readers here could physically fit into a manhole, much less survive a climb down any sort of non-motorized ladder.

Re:Terrorists? Definitely not.

[TheRaven64]

They might just be really, really, incompetent terrorists? I don't think we have a word mildinconvenienceists.

Re:Terrorists? Probably not.

[TheRaven64]

My money is on unionized workers

Well then, ionize the workforce in future.

Re:Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...

[Red Flayer]

Without attacks there is little incentive to build robust systems.

Without attacks there is little need to build robust systems.

Except natural disasters, of course, but you can turn them off in the options menu.

Re:Terrorists? Definitely not.

[X0563511]

I think the proper word we are all hunting for is "activist"

Re:Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...

[MWoody]

And on a related note, this is why I always insert multiple </b>'s into my text.

Re:Terrorists? Probably not.

[Fluffeh]

Hey hey hey! Hold it right there. I think there is LITTLE that strikes fear into the hearts of most nerds like being cut off from the net. So before you go waving your burning flags and crying alla akbar, maybe you should consider whistling like a 14.4k baud, and putting on that "I make Token Ring Networks" t-shirt.

On slashdot, THAT my friend, is true terror.

If you want to be a real tard, maybe throw in some rhetoric about head to head gaming via Com1!

Re:Terrorists? Probably not.

[Red Flayer]

Well then, ionize the workforce in future.

The day my employer strips me of my loosely bound electrons is the day I give notice.

Unless of course I'm on the "to be negatively charged" list, in which case:

Sucks to be you, alkali employees!!!

Re:Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...

[noidentity]

Reducing single points of failure is what is needed, which is not the same thing as multiplying the places it is possible to have failure.

But all the methods you describe have merit, but they also have a huge drawback -- cost. It's hard to get private entities to absorb the cost of redundant fiber, etc, since they will see very little gain from them.

So is the answer to nationalize our fiber infrastructure? Is that the only way we can make our systems secure?

I think I found a single point of failure in your message, just after the word "Reducing". We need redundant HTML bold end tags!

Re:Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...

[UncleTogie]

That said, central communication infrastructure will NEVER have the redundancies necessary to provide 100 percent proof against terror-by-backhoe. To expect such is folly.

Good point. Someone ought to design a nationwide network that can route around failures... the extreme case being a nuclear war. Ye gads, why doesn't the government fund such an idea?!?

Re:cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

To the contrary, it perfectly illustrates the idiocy of the entire concept.

Re:Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...

[Red Flayer]

I think I found a single point of failure in your message, just after the word "Reducing". We need redundant HTML bold end tags!

Agreed. With multiple closure tags, the HTML terrorists could have knocked out one of them, and it still would have closed properly.

Oh I'm sorry, they're not terrorists, they're disgruntled web developers.

Re:FRIST POST

[master5o1]

Yeah, but that's because you're not living in a city with their fibres cut.

Re:Hexapodia as the key insight?

[Bruce Perens]

I was thinking of Vinge when I wrote the article.