Fwd: [Clips] Re: The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat?

[coderman]

On 1/19/06, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at 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).