The Cyberthreat Under the Street | Hacker News Reader

The Cyberthreat Under the Street

nytimes.com

30 pointsdctoedt12 comments

The interesting thing is that researchers complain that nobody knows about what fiber is where... Which is absolutely true, and it's also at least sort-of a defense.

Mostly, though, it's a profit-maximization strategy. If you've ever tried to rent fiber, there are middlemen upon middlemen... it's pretty miserably crazy if you are a price sensitive sort.

It's a misnomer to call this a "cyber-threat". Criminals have been cutting telephone and telegraph wires since telephones and telegraphs have been invented. Cutting telegraph wires was a trademark of the James Younger gang in 1876. This is hardly a new phenomenon.

I used to cycle past Telehouse Docklands (in East London, part of LINX IXP) as part of my daily commute. I was always struck by the lack of physical security; all that was visible was a typical warehouse fence and a couple of cameras. However what was most troubling was the sheer density of unguarded under-pavement communication cabinets surrounding the site (of course I am only speculating that they are associated with Telehouse).

Security is an extra cost that people pay.

It does not produce food or produce anything. It only protect what you are producing or providing.

Why should anyone spend money protecting cabinets from vandals when there's no vandals.

Our society is also full of soft targets. Think events with crowds, or perhaps the malls and other area where it's clouded. Maybe you could jam the interstate system by strategically crashing cars at the same time.

Should we then spend money on providing more well armed security guards? Creating excess amount of roads that nobody can fully utilize?

Should we be terrified of highly competent boogeymen whose goal is to cause mayhem and chaos?

Telehouse Docklands has a pretty high level of physical security for the building itself for an urban carrier hotel and especially in both a first world highly safe city and the U.K. specifically.

They had special police with MP5s and stuff after a targeted attack.

Meh, it's been cut 16 times and what happened.....

Even if it killed a few people, so..... terrorism only works because everyone runs around after like their heads been cut off.

This doesn't seem to be working that way.

Life spans / productivity might have been increased with people having to go outside and leave the everyday normal.

I'm torn. If it were my family member who died I would feel different, but your logic about people not panicking is compelling.

However, these feel like probes for a long term project in which an attack on multiple fronts is coordinated after the softest parts of the underbelly have been precisely determined.

   Surprisingly, there isn’t even a good map of the Internet’s highways and byways

From a security perspective, that may be a feature.

> Notably, his research was partly funded by the Department of Homeland Security and can be accessed only by D.H.S.-approved researchers.

Glad to see the NY Times is uncritically supportive of denying to the public knowledge of our information infrastructure.

I posit that there need to be some secrets. Would it make sense to broadcast to everyone in the world, 'I had surgery on my head years ago, and if you hit me right here, I'll die'? Of course not.

Communications maps, I think, are legitimately one of those secrets, for so long as they offer a significant advantage to an adversary.

It seems plausible that this work would have been entirely impossible without government endorsement and government-guaranteed access restrictions. Some of the data he used was public record, but some of it was "cajoled" from commercial broadband providers; I can't imagine those guys making that information available to public researchers.

1. It's unclear how the quotation signifies the Times's support for the access restrictions.

2. The next sentence in the piece had an explanation: "'What we’re trying to avoid is giving bad guys a map to do bad things,' Professor Barford said. 'Now that we can see the possible pinch points in the U.S., we are looking at ways to mitigate them.'"

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