there are other easy ways to obtain outage information, especially
when the fiber affected handles significant amounts of traffic. they
have stemmed the tide of outage information but more than enough gets
by to be useful for this type of analysis. (although it was much
easier to just hit up the FCC for history when they kept track of it.
the telcos are just as glad to keep this data secret - they pushed as
hard as uncle sam to hide this data)
and as mentioned below, it doesn't take a backhoe either. highly
capable portable power tools, post hole diggers, a myriad of other
construction equipment, could wreak havoc just as easily. (Milwaukee
V28 portable saws are a good example - some disgruntled telco
employee(s?) in canada used a portable saw to cut two long distance
cables into the US causing over 280,000 circuits to go dead)
the tricky part is identifying redundant paths/rings as both must
usually be interrupted to create significant outage. (graph theory
applied to directed high degree node/link attacks)
there is a reason they are pursuing security through obscurity so
heavily. sometimes it's all you've got... :)
--- begin forwarded text
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: R. A. Hettinga
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.
--- end forwarded text
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R. A. Hettinga