The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat?

Sat Jan 21 13:27:32 UTC 2006

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> 	I for one have spoken in the past in favor of making the FCC Outage Reports public again. If you want to deliberatley destroy fiber infrastructure, you can gain more knowledge quicker by stepping outside your door and gazing upon clearly marked routes, than by reading outage reports.  Want to find a bldg where multiple carriers are housed? Read the carrier hotel advertisements on the internet and in print or read NANOG. 

Any idiot terrorist can walk up to a CO or colo and find the entrance
facilities (facility in more cases) and walk down the block looking for
manhole covers with company names or logo's. 

It doesn't matter if you cut it 10 miles or at the CO, it still takes 
the same amount of time to resplice it all. If it were at the CO it
would probably be done half-assed i.e. they throw a cable out the window
and splice that as a temporary fix not understanding just that, that it
does not matter where it's cut in most cases. There are methods and
methods and techniques to use to make the mitigation harder which I 
won't get into here, but anybody can knock out comm links with not a lot
of thought. FCC outages reports should be public because it keeps
carriers competing. We want that.

I don't know where this whole nonsense about not being able to find
metro loop fiber routes came from, but if a carrier refuses to at least show
you the redundancy on a map then they probably don't have it. It's 
pretty simple. Ask to see the DLR, the metro loop map, and ask where
your cross connects are going to be made, if any. If you're going to 
a carrier hotel, you are likely aggregating closer than you think and
you want to know. If you are single homed, don't bother asking those
questions.

-M<