Happy Friday!: Nationwide Comcast outage due to fiber cuts. Oops.
13 replies, posted
https://www.cnet.com/news/comcast-confirms-nationwide-outage/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/comcast-blames-widespread-service-outage-on-cut-fiber-line-1530308633
Basically a lot of people lost service due to cut lines in two zones.
https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1012785704273940480
The implications of this is kinda crazy too. Surprised there weren't any reports here. Then again I guess a lot of you didn't have internet at the time :p
sabotage sabotage sabotage
Hm yes what a great idea to have a few very large, very powerful companies controlling what is now essentially a basic utility for the developed world and something fucks up and large group of people are without it.
I don't see how them being monopolies has anything to do with this particular incident.
I have said this before, but might as well say it again: Breaking fiber optic cables is literally a case of getting into the box, and lightly pulling a cable until you hear a glass crack.
Also it seems the lines were cut between NYC in Chicago. This reeks of pre-planning for something bigger. Not a good thing at all.
What do you think is going to happen?
Not sure. Just doesn't seem right that three cables were cuts in a certain region on the same day. It's organized, and reeks of training ops.
It could be a foreign power testing the grid, which is hilariously easy to break as is, or it could be fringes. My money would usually sit with the former, but foreign powers are already able to capitulate most of the substations in this country with a bit of hacker gizmos.
If it's a bunch of crazy fringes, this could be something that said individuals/groups found on the chans. /k/ and /pol/ for the longest time have detailed a concept regarding Sabotage and Attack.
It goes like this: You have three teams. One is responsible for sabotaging infrastructure relating to cables. They go around and do stuff like this. Cut fiber, cut electric/telephone poles with chainsaws, and maybe shoot out wires at sub stations.
The second them works in coherence with the 1st and 3rd, but their goal is much more technical. They are required to go around and setup communication scrambling equipment. Stuff that'll fuck with cell towers and radios.
The third team is the masterful part of this, at least in my eyes. You have a team which uses a car with a modded trunk/hatch, similar to the DC snipers kit. Once team one and team two complete their sabotage, team three takes out targets of opportunity. Think of things like judges, jurors, political activist, cops, military, politicians, ect.
Your entire goal with those three teams is incapacitation of government infrastructure, and bogging up the response times of police and EMS. End result is complete and utter break down of social cohesion within a localized area. If used correctly you can also remove team three and focus on simply sabotaging the economic capacity of certain regions. Imagine wiping out the power grid in NY... Billions would be lost from a few days of black out.
Like I said, total speculation on my part, but I don't understand why someone would go forward with cutting wires, if their end goal is simply just being a minor nuisance.
And now we're all on a watchlist.
Not exactly related, but interesting nonetheless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL9q2lOZ1Fw
A huge part of Fire / Police / EMS interoperability nowadays hinges on independence from the internet.
Projects like APCO P25 are beacons of light for first responders because they enable completely off the grid communications, in some cases utilizing self-healing mesh networks for data.
Should any country attempt to carry out a direct attack on the comms structure of the country, this works perfectly.
And if they go for the power grid too, ANYONE can pretty much do whatever they want ANYWHERE in the country. Any kind of warning system we have is gone.
I dont know if order order ever could be restored.
A little more complicated than that. Major communication infrastructure is a good bit more resilient than internet infrastructure. Telephony has fuel generator backups, as do cellular towers.
Downside: All you need to knock down an entire cities cellphone communications is a briefcase sized device.
Also, the government has it's own private networking infrastructure that's a good bit deal more resilient than the public one (because companies like comcast like to not invest in any sort of redundancy)
the 4th of july is coming up soon
No worries it was just the Deep State splicing in their new Quantum AI profiling system.
I think some of you guys are looking too deep into this. I'm sure if anything some lines have been cut for a week or 2 and were marked as low priority because marketing is more important than service to Comcast; and then someone ran a car into a utility box and some maintenence dispatcher was just like "shit shit shit ma job" and had to bump this to highest priority :V
I used to use OVH for servers a lot and i always found myself surprised how every 2-3 months with them rats would chew through 2 fiber lines going west, something different would happen east, and then someone doing construction south of the datacenter would read the GIS wrong and take a bulldozer to those lines and leave them stranded for like 12 hours.
It just seems like if you have 12 fiber lines coming out you have so many backup plans but then you remember you ran them all wrapped around eachother so you still only have 3 failure points
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