[LINK] A Cyber-Attack on an American City

[Scott Howard]

Un-reported? Morgan Hill?

Firstly, the cable cuts were in San Jose and San Carlos, both a reasonable
disable north of Morgan Hill, although Morgan Hill was one of the areas
impacted, along with areas of San Jose, large parts of Santa Clara, and some
other areas.

Secondly, unless this guy lives in a cave I can't see how he could call the
cuts, or the impact they had, "unreported".  The media coverage here was
basically wall-to-wall on the cuts, the repairs, the outages to emergency
services, guesses at the reasons behind the cuts, the U$250,000 reward
offered, etc.  OK, so I live in Santa Clara (the city hit hardest by the
outage) so that's not exactly surprising, but even the US and worldwide
coverage for this even has been significant - not to mention wide coverage
on mailing lists, blogs, twitter, etc.

The author does make a few good points, but by overlooking the second cut at
San Carlos (which is what took our a lot of the redundancy which is built
into the system) much of what he says isn't valid.

Yes, these deliberate attacks do show how dependent many areas are on
services which are (relatively) easy to disrupt, but overall the execution
of the disaster planning that occurred worked very, very well.  Of course,
in an area that sits above multiple geological fault lines, that's not
exactly surprising...

  Scott.




On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Carl Makin <carl at stagecraft.cx> wrote:

> A Cyber-Attack on an American City
>
> http://perens.com/works/articles/MorganHill/
>
> 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.
>
> (more at the link)
>
>
> Carl.
>
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