Backbone Infrastructure and Secrecy

Eric Kuhnke eric at fnordsystems.com
Wed Jul 9 22:47:58 UTC 2003


I recall reading, last year, about a "Cyber Bunker" outside London UK which is being offered as colo to major banks.  The banks were raving praise about it.  This facility is an ex-RAF centralized radar control site, buried dozens of feet underground w/ thick concrete and designed to withstand nuclear weapon overpressure.  Blast doors, EMF shielding, dual-redundant air filtered generators, the works.

The people who bought it and turned it into a colo neglected to mention one thing:  It's in the middle of a farm field with a single homed fiber route to Telehouse Docklands. 

Anyone have a backhoe?  *snip*

DIVERSE ROUTES, people!

At 05:30 PM 7/9/2003 +0100, you wrote:

>Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:
>> However we can work to spread out the infrastructure more so that it
>> is harder for terrorists to find a single point of failure to attack.
>> If they have to coordinate an attack on 3 or 4 locations, there is an
>> increased probability that something will go wrong (as on 9/11) and
>> one or more of their targets will escape total destruction.
>
>I hate to be a doom sayer, but any chump with a couple of tools and
>rudimentary knowledge can lift manholes, cut cables and jump to another
>location in minutes. No amount of diversity could defend against a concerted
>attack like that unless you start installing very special low-level routes
>away from street level into many many buildings. Maybe you guys in the US
>are historically more paranoid, but London is just covered in single points
>of major failure for telecoms.
>
>Protecting the switching centres (IP or voice) looks great, but walk a few
>hundred feet and all senblence of physical security breaks.
>
>Peter





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