Here is an excellent summary by Bruce Perens about the recent attack on Morgan Hill. What failed, what worked, lessons learned, etc.

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

I wasn't sure if I should put this into the Survival Forum or the Long Term Forum.

Nice article thanks. I was wondering about that this morning, so good timing too.
I guess they will never know just who did it or why, but it sure raises a lot of points about how vulnerable most systems are.

Very interesting, thanks for posting it.

-Blast

Yes, very interesting.

The best quote:
"Realizing that they'd need more two-way radio, authorities dispatched police to wake up the emergency coordinator of the regional ham radio club, and escort him to the community hospital with his equipment. Area hams dispatched ambulances and doctors, arranged for essential supplies, and relayed emergency communications out of the area to those with working telephones."

The article has a link to the ARRL site, which has great stories about the hams who pitched in to help: http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2009/04/15/10771/?nc=1

Good food for thought.

Back at the height of Cold War, the Soviets had spec-ops teams specifically trained for that kind of work. I suppose there was an equivalent in the US as well.

In the 70's the entire US and Western European infrastructure was still fairly "mechanical". These days, it's all about fiber optics and electronics. I wonder just how much damage you could do now, targeting the fiber optics/communication system.

I'm sure most of us could survive a few days without power, water, traffic lights and whatnot. But the remaining 98% of the population would be in serious trouble, not to mention the economy. A pretty freaky proposition once you think of it.

This episode required someone to enter multiple locations to bring the fiber network down. Many more communities than one would imagine are true "single strand/single path" communities. Then all it takes is an errant backhoe operator in one spot and the results are the same. Believe me, I used to be the guy that fixed the problem.

On the plus side, more and more CATV companies are carrying voice and data on their networks. Often, the paths are close, but not in the same location. This "could" allow the local emergency officials to reroute to the undamaged provider, assuming they have agreements and protocols in place already. But we know what happens when we assume right?

From the sounds of it the act was co-ordinated by people who knew just which lines to cut at each location. If it was random vandals they would likely have just cut everything inside the access points. If somebody wanted to do serious damage the destruction of the manways would be on the list too so that the repair crews would be denied easy access to the damage.

So what can be done to prepare for such interruptions?
More radio links, more lines, better security?
What about for small business and private citizens?
Carry some cash, have a personal radio?
Maybe some prearranged plans for what your family should do if it happens are a good idea?

Because other than that I don't see much. I am not going to be the one trying to change how the phone companies run their lines or guard their manways to access those lines.

Having a small radio set is a possible response for me, but I don't know how much more I could do than that.

Does anybody have any other ideas because to me the basic problem is the same whether the damage is from people or a storm.
You lose communications and that includes forcing most businesses to shut until it is restored.

Personally speaking,,,as someone else has already suggested, this sounds like a test run to test the feasibility and effectiveness of such an act of sabotage.

I'd love to know how the perpetraters evaluated the effectiveness of this act. It looks to me though, that we can expect more and bigger such attacks upon our communications, command and control (C3), which would be a precursor to a bigger more physical attack upon the population.

Then again, I could be chasing butterflies out in right field!

One of the links in the article gave more information on a possible motive for the attack:

http://www.mercurynews.com/localnewsheadlines/ci_12106300

Yup HerbG, I read through the comments on that article and the paranoia is in full effect with many wild accusations at everybody everywhere.
My question is still about what a person could actually do to reduce the effects of a repeat.
For companies and govt services it is a different game in some ways, but for us average folks it is not the same thing as for them.
Trying to flag down a passing ambulance when your granny is having another heart attack is just not quite it somehow. There must be better ways to get around this type of stuff, things a person can do without relying on the phone companies to solve their major problems.
Communications are always at risk from vandalism like this, but as Desperado points out, one careless backhoe operator could do just as much or more damage, and lets not talk about fires or storms.

Reminds me of the tale when a 'Gypsy Traveller' took out one of NATOs most important front line air defence fields with his digger last year.


Even the Evil Galatic Empire had problems protecting its infrastructure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcL6DwSufMI&feature=related

Maybe I'm not paranoid enough but it seems like if someone were testing the system doing it like this would just tip their hand to the authorities, making it harder to do the same thing when it came time for the real strike.

I wonder if it was actually a warning. You know, somebody trying to point out just how easy it would be to bring it all down. It seems they could have made it a lot worse beyond just cutting the cables. Cutting them followed by torching the place would have made it a lot more difficult to repair.

-Blast

More than likely AT&T made someone redundant in the previous 6 months or having some industrial dispute at the time rather than any practise for a net centric 'terrorist' attack. Something like the company IT specialist getting made redundant who then requests an 'A' record re-point to 74.125.65.104 together with an 'MX' record repoint to some notorious exchange server in Kazakhstan. Sometimes it amazes me how long it can take your average SME business just to figure out how to fix the problem or even realise that there is one.

Possible motives:

A) Terrorists making a test run, checking the "cause and effects"?

Ask the FBI about this possibility.

B) One or more disgruntled employee(s) or former employee(s) getting a little payback?

Any recent layoffs from local or state telecommunications companies?

C) Someone(s) trying to draw attention to a weakness/security flaw in the system?

Eco-Terrorists, Extra right or left wing extremists, or an overzealous and overly concerned citizen's group?

D) The cable broke by itself due to: Earthquake 1's thru 3's/road traffic vibration/whatever else is possible?

What do you think?

A) Possible;
B) More likely than A);
C) Possibility between A) & B), not unheard of;
D) Per CDR Spock: "When all possibilities and probabilities have been exhausted, then the impossibile and improbable possibilities must be examined.

What Blast posted is more-or-less what I was thinking (stop that, dude, you're freaking me out:-). I don't buy the prelude-to-mayhem thing; it doesn't fit.

This has got to be some sort of dumb-ass grievance/revenge or criminal activity. And given the specific, precise nature the vandalism, I'll bet there's a short list that's getting shorter by the minute.

The only part that really interested me was the amateurs bailing out the pro's. Guess it's my contrary nature. I really need to get back into the ham thing.

I'd say there are far more effective models to attack than multiple underground line cuts. If it were me, I would find a microwave relay site or two and take them out. They are usually remote, not well monitored if at all, and handle a huge amount of traffic.

I don't know much about shortwave radio, but there are some low-power low-bandwidth "modes" that are text-only. I'd love to see a portable/handheld device that implemented a shortwave version of e-mail or instant message chat that would work without any support infrastructure, at least point-to-point. A shortwave Blackberry?? Does anything like that exist?

Thanks,
Steve