Attn MCI/UUNet - Massive abuse from your network

Fri Jun 25 16:12:45 UTC 2004

> Food for thought: Could an analyst, looking at outage reports over a
> period of time, build a schematic that would demonstrate that if you
> took out  n points, you'd kill x% of data traffic in and out of
> $pickyourmetropolitanarea? 
> 
> If this analyst were working for Bin Ladin....

Yes an analyst could do this. Our job is to make sure 
that he can't get a very large x% without also requiring
a large investment in n attack points.

Consider bin Laden's organization in 2000. They
had a plan to commandeer 10 airliners and attack
10 targets in the USA including things like the CIA
headquarters. Resource constraints caused them to
back off to 4 targets. We already win because 
the targets are not all in the same city block.

Next, the attack day arrived and the 4 teams
went to work. But only two of them achieved
100% objective. One team failed entirely when
they lost control of their weapon. And the third
team hit a glancing blow to the target that
damaged less than a fifth of the building. And
it turned out that they hit a less critical part
of the Pentagon as well. This is a typical result
of a military or terrorist operation. It is very
hard to plan and execute 100% effective coordinated
attacks against a large number of targets. On
9/11 the terrorists had no problem making 4 big booms
and getting attention. But they missed the Whitehouse
entirely and only did minor damage to the military
headquarters.

Remember, that packet switched networking 
originated with the desire to build a telecom
network that could survive massive destruction
on the scale of a nuclear war, but continue to
function. If we apply that kind of thinking to
planning network deployment then there should be
little extra risk from terrorist knowing where
the vulnerable points are. Spread the risk
by spreading the vulnerable points.

> Some ad hoc terrorists, in a country crawling with US troops, with a
> communications infrastructure nowhere as advanced as the USA just
> managed to coordinate a multiple bomb attack simultaneously. 

Iraq currently has a cellphone network that is 
more advanced than the USA, i.e. it's all GSM.
But in fact, all they really needed to pull this
off was a quiet pub and some accurate watches that
could be synchronized prior to the attacks. Better
go back and watch those old spy movies again...

--Michael Dillon