Bruce Perens: A Cyber-Attack on an American City

Wed Apr 22 22:28:00 UTC 2009

http://perens.com/works/articles/MorganHill/

 Cyber-Attack on an American City

 Bruce Perens

 Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed
 down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and
 cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on
 the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though
 startling, have gone almost un-reported.

 That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its
 centralization. The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost
 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone,
 DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms,
 ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities. In
 addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's
 internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources,
 leaving the hospital with a "paper system" for the day. 

 [...]

Good read, good summary for less-technical people.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.