Sabotage, the bad kind

[ritaxis]

Before dawn today somebody cut eight fiber optic cables serving land lines and cell phones in the areas around San Jose (and incidentally, Santa Cruz). The effect was massive: ATM machines and emergency services were also cut off. Also, no internet. No email.

It meant that lots of people in our area couldn't even call an ambulance.

On my part, I didn't get the car to the vet the last few days and it ran out of charge again, this time for no reason at all. Also, I haven't seen my cell phone in five days.

Comments

[julesjones]

Ew, nasty. I hope this wasn't a proof-of-concept for something bigger.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I was surprised how little disruption the rash of fiber-cuts in the Med a while back caused. Our digital infrastructure seems to be surprisingly resilient (of course that WAS an important design goal from the start, but I'm surprised we have enough redundancy in the actual long-distance links).

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Well, this part of it wasn't resilient. Climb into one locked underground cable room, cut some cables, and a huge part of a regional network goes down. It's scary, too--this wasn't an accident, or teenage amateurs--someone put some real effort into this.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think it was either three or five underground rooms. They cut four cables at one location and two or four cables at other locations afterwards.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

This one caused intense disruption. Four about fourteen hours you couldn't use a cellphone in a fairly populous and productive region, and you couldn't use a lot of land lines, you couldn't use an ATM machine, banks couldn't do a lot of their other business, and you couldn't dispatch an ambulance, and you couldn't use any internet at all. That's a lot of disruption.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

That's what makes me nervous. The stories were calling it 'vandalism', and I was thinking 'uh, no, vandalism is maybe trashing one cable by peeing in the connection box'. Sawing through multiple cables, in sites that most people wouldn't even know about? That's a serious attack, and makes you wonder what someone is testing out.

[brooksmoses]

Indeed; I'm really surprised that nobody was calling it "terrorism".

And, I guess, also a bit glad they weren't.

[julesjones]

When I checked the newspaper reports about what had happened, it was very clear this wasn't casual vandalism. Possibly vandalism by someone who knew exactly what they were doing, i.e. a novel method of going postal, but not likely to be the act of a bunch of bored teenagers.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

That sounds really bad. I hope they catch whoever did it.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the motive was -- to show it could happen or to cause distraction or something.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That's bothering me too.