full-disclosure - Re: back to high value targets

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Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:43:12 -0800
From: coderman <coderman@...il.com>
To: gmaggro <gmaggro@...ers.com>
Cc: Full Disclosure <full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: Re: back to high value targets

On Jan 31, 2008 12:35 PM, gmaggro <gmaggro@...ers.com> wrote:
> ...
> And a quip from the article that just tickles me pink: "...The outage,
> which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable..."

two cables:
FLAG Europe-Asia and SeaMeWe-4

> This is all assuming that the story is true; that it is one cable, and
> not a cover for something else. Glomar Explorer and K-129 anyone? Maybe
> they're just patching in another Echelon node, hehe :)

you'd be surprised how often trawlers, boat anchors, cable scavengers
(yes, really!) and even marine life sever under sea cables... or maybe
you wouldn't.

no need to attribute to skilled malice (NSA taps from the undersea bay
of the Jimmy Carter sub fiber splicing deck) what is easily
accomplished via sheer stupidity or carelessness or simple bad luck.

> Doesn't really matter how or why the damage occured, the point is that
> fairly massive single points of failure clearly exist.

rarely single points, but pairs or small groups.  the moment you get a
good pair of failures in a critical link, you often see cascading
failures, and it turns into a a cyclone of crap hitting fans.. whee

> What does matter
> is how similar results could be replicated by a loose coalition of
> like-minded individuals using highly insecure media.

"i wuz just fishin' fur dungeness offisah, didnt mean no harmz to dem cablz!!"

> I seriously wonder what the bandwidth of those are.

DWDM can get pretty fat.  the economic incentives to squeeze as much
bandwidth as possible through every single strand makes these the
phattest of the phat pipes, in general.

> On a somewhat related note, it's always been my guess that very little
> net traffic, relatively speaking, is carried over satellites due to the
> distance and lag issues. Is this a foolish notion?

i don't know figures (anyone?) but this tends to be the case.  sats
are great for broadcast relay, but suck for low latency bi-directional
comms.  however, they do make useful backups.  how else are you going
to get data back and forth across the planet when those fibers get
sliced?

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