Quote:
Originally Posted by The Reaper
No vulnerability assessment or hardening of critical nodes?
Wonder how many other places (and key infrastructure targets) could be attacked in a similar fashion?
TR
|
Fifty guys could bring down the Internet for a long, long time without firing a shot. One fiber optic node in Manhattan alone would bring down the eastern seaboard. Three, maybe four node centers, cut maybe five major fiber optic cables, take out several DNS data centers -- that's all it would take to crash the economy.
The location of all this infrastructure is detailed online -- it's mandated by federal regs. I recall a few years back a network security guru picked an address off of a list and just walked into a major node facility in central Illinois. He took selfies next to the cabling/infrastructure.
All the data cables come ashore along beaches. They're supposed to be buried but the ocean does its thing. Hell, you can see the cables coming ashore via Google Earth.
Our underbelly is so soft that I'm shocked that this hasn't happened yet. Especially when many detailed attack scenarios have been published on the Internet (some by regulators trying to wake people up) or woven into apocalyptic fiction. One site lists the address of the Manhattan building that houses
the critical node for the east coast and even has a picture of the single doorman/guard who is the only security for the building.
Google "how to take down the Internet" sometime. Or "how to take down the grid."