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Comment by sacrosancty | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to be a "professional" to find where important internet cables are, lift manhole covers and chop them in two places with some sort of cordless powertool or whatever. You just need to be motivated enough to do a targeted vandalism instead of a random one. This reminds me of computer hacks where the victim describes the attack as "sophisticated" to try and hide their own security incompetence.

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Multiple separate locations,

coordinated at the same time partly at night,

using power tools to cut fiber in ways that are hard to repair,

That does scream professional job.

Now I agree that many countries manage their physical network security in a weak/ lousy way.

Interestingly, poorer countries tend to do a better job because they know people will mess with infrastructure.

It's a level of "professionalism" and coordination that can be easily expected of some random Dota player.

I fail to see any sophistication here.

Motivation, on the other hand, is above and beyond.

Coordinating people is hard. Moreso at night. And while breaking the law. That’s the sophisticated part, discipline.

That actually sounds a lot like Dota, to be fair.

Hardest part of this is actually knowing where and what. I agree that actual timing part is quite trivial, everyone has clocks.

The difference between coordinating in meatspace vs a computer game is being under-valued in this thread.

To a fairly absurd degree!

What does night time have to do with it?

Multiple locations, coordinated roughly at the same time: that's boyscout level hard. You need a map and a watch, is all.

You don't need power tools, just a cutter. This is fiberglass coated in something like PVC. A knife will do. This "hard to repair" refers to making two cuts, a bit further apart than whatever slack is in the cable. You do that by taking up the slack, then making cuts where the cables don't touch.

It does not scream professional in the slightest, only motivation and a few like-minded people.

Not speaking about what they need:

That's what they used.

And I guess they did use power tools to go faster for the two cuts required.

I think you underestimate the work needed, especially when doing black bag (IE illegal and covert) operations.

Now maybe some people with actual experience could give us better figures, ... But they tend to stay quiet

Would you know where to cut in your metro to ensure maximum impact to the target?

Is that the type of thing they teach in the scouts these days?

You walk along major roads, railways, rivers and under bridges checking for manholes. They have the owners' names on them. If it's the name of a telco, there's fiber in there.

Watch is superfluous.

They way it's done is everyone checks in to a group chat when they are in position and then one person in charge (either back at home or even himself in the field) tells the group to go when he judges everything to be ready.

A decent high leverage cable cutter costs under $50 and cuts through fibre like butter. A few seconds at each point where fibre is accessible is all that's needed to do damage that costs hundreds to thousands of dollars to fix. Damage a cable in multiple locations and it's pretty easy to create a 24+ hour outage as repair crews won't know the extent of damage until multiple repairs are made. Physical telecom infrastructure is really easy for a determined attacker to take out of service, and if they're wearing an orange vest, nobody will think twice to question them.

Reading between the lines of the previous reports the particular locations chosen to cut seem to suggest some inherent knowledge about major transport networks.

In the sense they knew where to go to take down primary and backup paths etc. Cut the cables twice to prevent easy splicing etc.

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