How to wipe the internet from Egypt to India

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How to wipe the internet from Egypt to India

Postby jingofever » Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:01 pm

LINK

Today, Internet users from Cairo to Calcutta are either without the Web or their service is operating at a fraction of its normal capacity. The culprit? A ship off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, dragged its anchor and snagged two major underwater telecommunications cables. Unfortunately for Internet addicts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India, the SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia cables, which carry the majority of Internet service between Western Europe and the Middle East and South Asia, were the ones cut.

Some time ago I read an article where an American military officer wished that he had someone in every country who knew where the cables were, so in the event of a whim, the country could be plunged into communications darkness.
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Postby Joe Hillshoist » Thu Jan 31, 2008 11:10 pm

This article proves there are no terrorists. I mean Al quaeeeaeda is a front.
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Postby jingofever » Fri Feb 01, 2008 2:14 pm

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Postby jingofever » Fri Feb 01, 2008 4:09 pm

Another cable has been severed.

I'm not ready to call any of this deliberate.
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Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Feb 02, 2008 10:03 pm

I didn't mean to suggest it was deliberate.

What I meant was that if there was a group of terrorists determined to bring down the Western powers then there are plenty of vulnerable cables across the world. All it would take is a shovel, an axe and a bit of time to work out where the cables are, and a couple of DnS attacks and it'd be all over wouldn't it?

To me the fact it hasn't happened yet is pretty telling.
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Postby jingofever » Sun Feb 03, 2008 1:04 am

That comment wasn't aimed at you, it was only my take on Cablegate. The military officer I mentioned phrased it like that: a man, a shovel, an axe, a cable, elbacaexanalevohsanama. There is a lot that enterprising terrorists could be doing to sow terror. It's already illegal to carry a shovel in Iraq, maybe they're scared.
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Postby jingofever » Sun Feb 03, 2008 5:12 pm

According to this article, some Egyptian ministry is saying there were no ships in the area at the time the damage was done.

And jon_k has an intriguing comment at reddit:

I'm in Dubai currently and they reported on the news that the cables have been destroyed by a cutting torch.

It showed pictures of the lengths, and they do indeed look like they were cleanly cut. One of the engineers who went down on the dive said that it appears a cutting torch was used to sever the cables. They said that they'll have to replace an entire 1/8th mile section of the cable to restore services and that the work should be complete by the end of the week.


Uncorroborated though.

Another interesting comment by aecarol:

Replying to myself, there is a problem with a forth connection according to ArabianBusiness.com, but they claim sources indicate the problem is not a cut cable, but a problem with the "power system" that is expected to be fixed in a "few" days.

Nothing is cut off, but they are operating at 40% capacity.

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/510132-i ... reak?ln=en

Lines and connections go up and down all the time and the surplus capacity of the system absorbs most of it. But when you have 3 hard cut cables (for whatever reason), there is no slack left and "normal" problems such as the 4ths power issue become important.


Edit: The Egyptian ministry's press release.
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Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sun Feb 03, 2008 7:57 pm

Interesting - cheers.
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Postby jingofever » Tue Feb 05, 2008 12:39 am

jingofever wrote:And jon_k has an intriguing comment at reddit:

I'm in Dubai currently and they reported on the news that the cables have been destroyed by a cutting torch.

It showed pictures of the lengths, and they do indeed look like they were cleanly cut. One of the engineers who went down on the dive said that it appears a cutting torch was used to sever the cables. They said that they'll have to replace an entire 1/8th mile section of the cable to restore services and that the work should be complete by the end of the week.


There has been no follow up to this and from what I can tell, nothing in the news from Dubai. I consider this to be a load of horseapples. It did seem that the divers were a little too quick about their work...

But who knows, maybe Egypt will find neatly severed cables.
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Postby jingofever » Wed Feb 06, 2008 6:21 pm

About blow torches and cables, from an old Wired article:

Most of the fishing-related damage is caused by trawlers, which tow big sacklike nets behind them. Trawlers seem designed for the purpose of damaging submarine cables. Various types of hardware are attached to the nets. In some cases, these are otter boards, which act something like rudders to push the net's mouth open. When bottom fish such as halibut are the target, a massive bar is placed across the front of the net with heavy tickler chains dangling from it; these flail against the bottom, stirring up the fish so they will rise up into the maw of the net.

Mere impact can be enough to wreck a cable, if it puts a leak in the insulation. Frequently, though, a net or anchor will snag a cable. If the ship is small and the cable is big, the cable may survive the encounter. There is a type of cable, used up until the advent of optical fiber, called 21-quad, which consists of 21 four-bundle pairs of cable and a coaxial line. It is 15 centimeters in diameter, and a single meter of it weighs 46 kilograms. If a passing ship should happen to catch such a cable with its anchor, it will follow a very simple procedure: abandon it and go buy a new anchor.

But modern cables are much smaller and lighter - a mere 0.85 kg per meter for the unarmored, deep-sea portions of the FLAG cable - and the ships most apt to snag them, trawlers, are getting bigger and more powerful. Now that fishermen have massacred most of the fish in shallower water, they are moving out deeper. Formerly, cable was plowed into the bottom in water shallower than 1,000 meters, which kept it away from the trawlers. Because of recent changes in fishing practices, the figure has been boosted to 2,000 meters. But this means that the old cables are still vulnerable.

When a trawler snags a cable, it will pull it up off the seafloor. How far it gets pulled depends on the weight of the cable, the amount of slack, and the size and horsepower of the ship. Even if the cable is not pulled all the way to the surface, it may get kinked - its minimum bending radius may be violated. If the trawler does succeed in hauling the cable all the way up out of the water, the only way out of the situation, or at least the simplest, is to cut the cable. Dave Handley once did a study of a cable that had been suddenly and mysteriously severed. Hauling up the cut end, he discovered that someone had sliced through it with a cutting torch.

There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn't going to happen. "Cutting a submarine cable," Barnes says, "is like starting a nuclear war. It's easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate.
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