LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 12:45:09 +0930

Re: Southern Cross.

On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 11:13:27AM +0930, Glen Turner wrote:
> Grant wrote:
> > 
> > Isn't the latest issue with the apparently broken segment of the cable
> > highlighting the fact that it is trivial to kill any internet link to
> > Australia? Doesn't anyone think that this is a nice niche for some form
> > terrorism?
> 
> The Southern Cross outage was because of two faults, one
> on each side of the world.
> 
> Terrorism apon communications infrastructure is more than
> possible.  In military terms this is called "removing
> civilian command and control infrastructure" and is
> currently a favoured strategy of the US military.
> 
> The targets are not so much the Internet as telephony.
> As these converge you can expect Internet-specific
> assets to become targets.


Glen,

Perhaps I could just add to this a note about
the notorious "angle grinder" attack on Sydney's
telephone network in about 1988.
You might know much more about this, I expect.

In that case, a disgruntled ex-employee of Telstra
went into an underground junction area and severed
huge numbers of critical cables. This was a case where
multiple connectivity of links does nor give extra
protection in the event of an attack.
In the mathematics of network reliability, I believe
people refer to analysis of this sort of thing as
"vulnerability analysis" as opposed to "reliability
analysis". In the latter, failures are assumed to be
random, according to various engineering notions of
reliability. In the former, the failures are assumed to
be malicious. So the failures are then not random at all.

Given a detailed logical and physical map of resources,
a malicious person makes all of the supposed reliability
of multiply connected network disappear. I've heard from
time that there are important single points of failure
in Australia's communications, e.g. at certain beaches,
but I imagine that this is much less so than previously.

My point is: "terrorism" by ex-employees with inside knowledge
is probably a greater threat than an outside force.
But of course, the US makes a point of getting enough inside
knowledge on any country to be able to cripple them very
quickly, as they pretty much did with the metal coils on
the Serbian power supplies during the Kosovo hostilities.

There are some people out there who have a festering
anger against governments (because they won't permit them
to have their own private armies etc.), and combined with 
inside info, such anger could lead to succesful attacks.

But in the event of large-scale comms failures, there's 
always the ham internet, and other sorts of comms.
I wouldn't worry, personally.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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