Vulnerbilities of Interconnection

Fri Sep 6 17:30:20 UTC 2002

At 07:41 PM 05/09/2002 -0400, batz wrote:

>On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 sgorman1 at gmu.edu wrote:
>
>:The question is what if someone was gunning for your fiber.  To date
>:cuts have been unintentional.  Obviously the risk level is much higher
>:doing a phyisical attack, but the bad guys in this scenario are not
>:teenage hackers in the parents basement.
>
>This happened recently  in Quebec where there is a labour
>dispute with Videotron and one of the unions representing its workers.
>The dispute has been exaserbated by the sabotage of the companies fiber
>lines.

Quick summary for those not familiar with this story
http://therecord.com/business/technology/z083017A.html

Its an interesting to contemplate how this event was presented in the media 
and perceived by the public at large. Consider the end result in the above 
story and consider two different motives. a) Angry union or union 
sympathizers cut fibre optic lines to put pressure on company, or corporate 
strike busters cut cable to make union look bad.... vs. b) International 
terrorists cut fibre optic lines....

With a) its a filler news item to be displaced by Shark Attacks and Gary 
Condit.  b) Two words: media frenzy.   Same end result, but two totally 
different reactions because of who the terrorists are/were...

How about network operators ? Would you be any more or less pissed and 
react differently at the motives as to why someone attacked your network 
?  On a day to day basis, I see far more attacks from the "usual suspects" 
than from anything media frenzy worthy.  I mean, how many code red and 
MS-SQL worm attacks do you see on a day to day basis.... Its so much, that 
I explain to customers its like cosmic background radiation when they turn 
on their firewalls for the first time and see connect attempts to port 1433 
from international IP addresses :-(

         ---Mike