Well, redundancy is basically universal, thanks to SONET rings. In fact, this is why there was any traffic at all on 9/11 and why Wall Street was able to come back on line so quickly afterwards. Even the big CO on West Street, which took some decent damage (and which I can see over my right shoulder), was rebooted very quickly thereafter (and true to GR-63-CORE just about all the equipment came back online correctly provisioned). BUT, someone knowledgeable about Ring architectures and other things could fairly easily figure out how to disconnect big chunks of the network if they really wanted to, and in such a way to cause some real damage. In telecom it always surpirsed us that "terrorists" never seemed to try this. -TD
From: coderman <coderman@gmail.com> To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> CC: cypherpunks@jfet.org Subject: Re: Fwd: [Clips] Re: The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat? Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 16:29:50 -0800
On 1/19/06, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
Back when I was in Telecom we used to talk about how silly most terrorist attacks are, at least in terms of real damage: The COs are only barely guarded...a few well placed surprises could have an impact that far exceeds mere PR.
the solution (at least, the only effective solution aside from significant infrastructure redundancy - $$$) is rapid repair, and att's disaster recovery program works well in this regard. if you recall after the trade center attacks (taking out massive CO capacity) they used a fleet of mobile switching trailers to terminate and switch all of the damaged fiber.
this type of disaster recovery is also expensive, but much less than buried infrastructure and fixed COs.
The interesting thing is that packetized traffic (combined with optical layer protection) might makes things even less disruptable...
in my experience severely congested packet networks are just as shitty as outages in general; what good is that broadband line when your path to the world is constrained at 14.4? :P
the real problem is the lack of diversity at the physical "X fibers through same conduit / RoW" layer that forces a single point of failure. the telco idea of path diversity is one ring buried plant and the other ring aerial plant along the same right of way... doesn't take much for a clustered outage in this environment to disrupt packet/cell based networks as much as dedicated circuits.
in this respect the DHS paranoia over bridge photography begins to make a little more sense (although still useless).