mwindsorfw | 16 Oct 2018 5:14 a.m. PST |
Just an interesting note. AT&T in north Texas (Dallas-Fort Worth) internet customers lost their service for 13 hours when the one room that contained a primary and the backup electrical switch caught fire. There was no other redundancy in the system. Makes you wonder how easy it would be to disrupt large areas of internet service at a crucial time. |
aegiscg47 | 16 Oct 2018 6:49 a.m. PST |
The U.S. military already has BLU-114/Bs, which are cluster bombs that disperse clouds of carbon filaments that were used to successfully shut down the electrical grid in Serbia and the second Iraq War, so taking down the Internet of an enemy could be done that way. The NSA and DOD also have weaponized versions of computer viruses and many, many other tricks to carry out DOS attacks. The capability to send a country back to the stone age in terms of technology is available. |
cloudcaptain | 16 Oct 2018 6:51 a.m. PST |
That happened to a backbone provider I worked for once as well. Their was some kind of electrical fire under the street out in front of the main building. The local fire department put it out with water (facepalm). Any time there is a major fiber cut you can loose huge amounts of customers. I've been through multiple outages where large chunks of the East Coast were down because a train wreck severed cable. Makes for an interesting scenario! Stopping terrorist groups from hijacking trains and derailing them in the right places. You could also have sewer-crawls where the baddies were trying to take down Level 3 or the like. |
mwindsorfw | 16 Oct 2018 7:22 a.m. PST |
A country could wage a covert, microwar. Knock out internet service to large numbers of customers in cites that are hostile to your cause on Election Day. You wouldn't need to hack the actual results. Just disrupt voting and make people question the legitimacy of the process. |
Andrew Walters | 16 Oct 2018 7:53 a.m. PST |
Ironically, the Internet Protocol was originally designed to be durable in the case of a major war. Any computer can talk to any computer, there is no central node, no single Achilles heel. I bet some companies and some places have redundancy, while others don't. I also bet no one knows which places are which. Surely properly run businesses and agencies have thought through various catastrophes and have contingency plans. On the other hand, the California firefighters bought a plan from Verizon that was fine for work-a-day disasters but didn't have enough data for a major event. So last Summer during the truly huge fires Verizon throttled their internet. Nice going, everyone. They had to rely on other agencies, personal phones, and finally buy a more expensive plan. On the other, other hand, maybe that prompted everyone to sort out how they'll function under catastrophic circumstances and now everything is peachy. Personally, internet isn't that expensive, so why not have two connections for your business or agency that *must* have internet? AT&T goes down, your ComCast is still up. You still need a plan for when the whole thing goes down, of course. |
Oberlindes Sol LIC | 16 Oct 2018 11:20 a.m. PST |
I like cloudcaptain's idea for a gaming scenario. It could a role-playing game, with the PCs playing either the terrorists or the counter-terrorism unit (or, I suppose, a company's internet security team). It could also be an interesting cat-and-mouse miniatures game in a tunnel system as the terrorists try to get to the node they want before the counter-terrorists stop them. |
dwight shrute | 16 Oct 2018 3:03 p.m. PST |
build a giant faraday cage … :-) |
Zephyr1 | 16 Oct 2018 8:36 p.m. PST |
I've got Verizon's AOL Dialer, so it doesn't take much more than a butterfly sneezing an area code away to shut it down anyway… :-p |
Lion in the Stars | 16 Oct 2018 8:45 p.m. PST |
A country could wage a covert, microwar. Knock out internet service to large numbers of customers in cites that are hostile to your cause on Election Day. You wouldn't need to hack the actual results. Just disrupt voting and make people question the legitimacy of the process. If your voting machines are talking to the internet, you're doing it wrong. Example from XKCD:
Any questions? |