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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat?
While it is always fun to call the government stupid, or anyone else for that matter, there is a little more to the story. - For one you do not need a backhoe to cut fiber - Two, fiber carries a lot more than Internet traffic - cell phone, 911, financial tranactions, etc. etc. - Three, while it is very unlikely terrorists would only attack telecom infrastructure, a case can be made for a telecom attack that amplifies a primary conventional attack. The loss of communications would complicate things quite a bit. I'll agree it is very far fethced you could hatch an attack plan from FCC outage reports, but I would not call worrying about attacks on telecommunications infrastructure stupid. Enough sobriety though, please return to the flaming. ----- Original Message ----- From: Joe Maimon <[email protected]> Date: Thursday, January 19, 2006 12:01 pm Subject: Re: The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat? > > > > Dennis Dayman wrote: > > > "In 2004, Department of Homeland Security officials became > fearful that > > terrorists might start using accidental dig-ups as a road map > for deliberate > > attacks, and convinced the FCC to begin locking up previously > public data on > > outages. In a commission filing, DHS argued successfully that > revealing the > > details..." > > > > --MORE-- > > > > http://wired.com/news/technology/0,70040-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_1 > > > > -Dennis > > > > > > > > This is really stupid. Assuming the terrorist actually have the > dozens > of backhoes needed to completely erase meaningfull internet > connectivity > in north america, they would probably prefer to use them to smash > cars > and kill people on the interstate highways or something. > > Terrorist inflict terror by killing people, not by forcing > internet > explorer to display "page cannot be displayed". > > Let us not assume that murderous terrorist are as dumb as people > in DHS. >
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