One of the first actions of the UK Navy in WWI was to cut the telegraph lines coming out of Germany. The monopoly of information is one of the most important facets of modern warfare.
Freaking Osama Bin Frogman... WTF..
A fourth is out -- supposedly power-related. But the cable's power supply is integrated in the 'wrapper' -- see Wired 1996: http://www.wired.com/wired/
archi...ffglass_pr.html
Oh. And Egypt just closed the Gaza Strip.
zombie frogmen are cutting all cable - and cable related activities (laying cable, thinking about cable, looking at things tied with cable, etc) - related to GWOT.
TheGallopingBeaver has an interesting theory about the cable cuts. Hint: (Do you know where the USS Jimmy Carter is?) It's an interesting theory...
Someone's trying rather hard to black out SW Asia. And the list of those with motives (starting with the VP of the US) starts at the door.
Wengler, you beat me to the punch with the Royal Navy's cable cutting story. After hearing that 4 cables have been cut it looks like an invasion of Iran might be occurring soon, or someone is trying to blackmail/silence those in that part of the world
"These outages caught my attention before, the 3rd one cut should be setting off alarm bells at Langley..."
Alarm bells? Why? You don't ring alarm bells after executing a successful operation, you pop the champaigne!
:-/
An Iran invasion would already have happened by this time. The Army puts synchronicity right up there next to God the Father of Battles.
They most assuredly wouldn't dribble the line cuts out over a week or so. Cheney might be dumb enough to telegraph the punch that way, because he has the sort of stupidity that only raw arrogance can breed. But the guys doing the operational planning are going to be Army staffers. They may be corrupt, but they're not that stupid.
If somebody's trying to black out that part of the world, then they're either going to go after satellites or else they're smoking crack.
Now, blackmail makes more sense. Blacking out a region by cutting cables became impractical within a couple of decades after Telstar went live, but I expect it'd hit a few corps right smack in the pocketbook. Cutting cables is quite an excursion from the usual cybercrook playbook, though.
But I'd expect cybercrooks running a blackmail operation to go after unpatched flaws in the Cisco backbone infrastructure first. Lord knows the Microsoft monoculture is porous enough to furnish many, many proxies through which attacks could be mounted. And the last year and a half has shown that they are goddamn good at turning Windows boxes. Think "Storm Worm".
If I had to pull a differential diagnosis out of my ass, I'd guess as follows:
(1) Most likely root cause = coincidence + fuckup. I've handled too many information security incidents to EVER underestimate the power of human stupidity again.
(2) Next most likely = blackmail.
(3) Information warfare would be a distant third.
I wasn't thinking of criminals blackmailing the someone, I was thinking more of the US trying to blackmail some foreign power. Or of it as some form of saber rattling.
Doesn't make sense, tenacitus. A threat of the sort you seem to suggest is a political act So it has to be frightening and public in order to be effective. The guy making the threat wants it on page 1 of every newspaper.
Low visibility threats are inefficient by their nature. That probably has as much to do with the absence of AQ attacks against information assets as their lack of capability (i.e., pools of experienced blackhat hackers) does.
You hit the WTC with a hijacked airliner and the consequent public explosion and fire are going to be on every TV in America. Compromise three quarters of the servers in the AT&T building in Bridgeton and you don't get that result. Or anything even close.
This one never got noticed by anybody except security geeks, people who read blogs, and the poor bastards who get to fix or re-lay the severed cables.
Never think something was done by evil if incompetence is a possibility. While I find these broken cables to be curious, my assumption is that they were doomed by design factors, shortcuts or trying to save money when laying or maintaining. I look forward to more info.
..trying to save money when laying or maintaining..
LOL. Betcha they outsourced everything but banking the checks.
Stormcrow: while the cable cuts don't stop communications they do stop internet traffic...you every try satilite internet..lsot of drop packets, slower then dialup speeds(lots of pipe but a very slow folw..instane amounts of lag) we got stuck doing a lot of extra work friday and over the weekend as our india call center was out of commishion.
If it was one cable, I could buy design flaw or stupidity. But when it gets to 2, I get suspicious. When it gets to be 3 or 4, that's no coincidence. And when the country that loses 100% of packet flow is Iran, that's no coincidence.
My first thought was "When is the attack coming?" It hasn't yet, so I figure this is a show of force.
Who uses the internet in Iran? I would think the nascent Iranian oil bourse would. So show them who's boss by screwing with them a little. It's nothing they can't work around, but it inconveniences them and shows them what you could do if they really piss you off.
I agree, this is a clumsy, inefficient, ham-handed maneuver. But what else has our foreign policy been under Bush/Cheney?
Egypt said no ships were in the region for an anchor to do any damage.
Someone on another blog suggested terrorist sharks were responsible. LOL!
Look to the usual suspects who are trying to drag us into another war. Even stop the next US election.
Consider this: the effected countries have to reroute their traffic during the month or more it will take to repair the cables, who will they reroute to? To AT&T from what I have read.
So who benefits and how from the bulk of mid-east and asian/indian traffic being rerouted over AT&T concurrent with the news that the NSA working with AT&T is now in charge of US internet security.
This may not be about an attack or Iran, whoever did this may have a bigger immediate concern about how foreign markets and foreign holders of our debt will react to our continued financial meltdown.
Just a thought...
And when the country that loses 100% of packet flow is Iran, that's no coincidence.
That story is categorically untrue.
Do y'all think that the American controlled communication satellites will be allowed to carry Iranian connections?
Kuwaiti, Saudi - no problem. Iranian - not so much...
No surface ships were in the affected areas, does not mean that no ships were in the affected areas.
loveandlight-
I stand corrected. I had seen the early reports and not updates.
I still think it's damn suspicious, though, and refuse to believe it's a coincidence.
This has caused me alot of rage.
If you want to tap an undersea fiber optic cable, you will be letting the operator of the cable know, by the slow down in traffic.
Cutting the cable at site a, then installing a tap at site b, will go undetected. The operator will sent a cable repair ship to site a, repair the break, and never notice the tap at site B.
Where is the USS Jimmy Carter?
I read a paper last week, and I'm lookin for the linky, about what tracking internet/voice traffic really entails. I mean, I know telecom data is fairly unreliable at best to try to trace internationally. So when the first one went down I thought they were perhaps installing some new surveliance having to do with that.
Now, I think it might be like when you have an unlabled breaker box and have to turn them off one by one to see what happens what lights go off and such.
I never bought the anchor story. Please. How lame. However, I'm thinking Langley is in on it already. I think it has more to do with the current regimen's determination to retain power and their reloation to dubai hq.
New Rule: No more people named Dick in high office.
(I already have a "no more men named bill for boyfriend" policy and its working quite well. Perhaps a national rule is in order for Dicks)
Here's the paper. Interesting read.
http://www.crypto.com/papers/paa...rs/paa-
ieee.pdf
terrorist sharks
With frickin' laser beams?
not terrorist sharks, vengeful whales.
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