Taking out the Internet with a hacksaw

Is our entire society and economy based upon an insecure and unprotected resource? It's hard to imagine life -- for even a day or a week -- without the Internet. Yet that's precisely the scenario that BitGravity described earlier today.

This morning many people in Silicon Valley woke up without 911 service, Internet, cellular phones, and in some cases TV. Web sites were impacted and Internet traffic between a few major datacenters stopped flowing. Several of our employees were cut off from the Internet and phone service.

AT&T put out a press release stating that there was a fiber cut, but to make this happen, there had to be several cuts. According to several employees that work at AT&T, it may have been done by the very people that repair this stuff, the Communication Workers of America Union (CWA).

Speculation, to be sure, but one thing is certain: knowledge of the location of specific fiber links within very specific manholes was necessary.

And the CWA contract with AT&T apparently expired on Saturday night. In fact, press releases from the CWA are quite open about their dispute.

For those of you working this weekend, remember – NO BUSINESS AS USUAL.

Our mission is to stop the destruction of our Union by our employers. It is to protect and better the lives of our retired, current and future members. We will re-grow our Union by educating, strengthening and uniting our membership in order to impact our employers through strategic use of our power.

The fiber cuts were "clean, done apparently [with] a hacksaw."

The first major cut occurred at approximately 0200 in the South East Bay. This took out the city of Santa Cruz.

The next cut occurred at 0400, which decapitated San Francisco's Metromedia Fiber Network -- a major thoroughfare for Internet traffic.

The manholes are within driving distance of each other.

What’s more terrifying, the cuts were clean and easy to fix, but what would happen if they were mangled and more calculated? What happened if rather than going down into the manhole, the perpetrator poured many gallons of gasoline down the hole, and tossed a match on it? It could have melted all the fiber/glass/plastics together, causing complete mess making the problem much worse.

Fiber maps such as the one below show details on exactly where fiber runs are and how to locate perfect targets, found directly off of almost every network provider’s web site:

Now, what would happen if someone were to coordinate with a group of people and demolish key areas where fiber concentrations are very thick in major cities around the world.

And what if these attacks were coordinated?

No ATM service. No 911. No phone calls. Oh, and hellz no... no Twitter.

As we are reminded, three undersea cables were simultaneously sliced earlier this year.

Sound improbable? Three undersea cables –- Sea Me We3 partly, Sea Me We4 and FLAG -- were cut on December 19, 2008. These cuts caused "significant Internet access disruptions between Europe and Asia/Near East zone."

A coordinated attack. No ATM service. No 911. No phone calls. No Internet.

All quite vulnerable to a series of physical security breaches. DHS better take note.