[113886] in North American Network Operators' Group
Bruce Perens: A Cyber-Attack on an American City
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Greco)
Wed Apr 22 18:28:35 2009
From: Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:28:00 -0500 (CDT)
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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.
