Do we know who owns the 3* undersea cables? Is it all one company?
*is a fourth break confirmed?
It’s several companies. The one that is broken and goes from Australia to somewhere in the ME (I don’t recall where) is owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. One of the other companies is Telstra Corp. (I don’t recall who the third one is).
My understanding is that two of the cables were actually in pretty close proximity, so an anchor or trawler COULD have gotten both of them in a single swipe by accident (or on purpose).
One more time. As I and others have been saying, one theory is that it was done to disable the cable so that any tampering wouldn’t be detected. And the point of cutting it underwater would be to slow any repairs. There’s no reason to assume that a tap or anything else done to the cable would be done anywhere near the break, or underwater, for that matter. That’s a strawman of yours.
So ? That doesn’t mean that people won’t try. Governments burying themselves in surveillance data to the point of it being self defeating isn’t a new thing.
Because it’s all in one physical spot. And it’s not their network, assuming it is the US government. Do you think that foreigners are going to give America the kind of access they get here ?
Really. You are overlooking that these cables aren’t in America, and the American government can’t tell a foreign telecommunications company to give them access to everything without being told to go to hell. Or the Russian government, or some company interested in industrial espionage, or whatever.
Except as mentioned in one of the news stories, no such ship was there. And that wouldn’t explain the third.
So…the US government cut the cable so that no one would be able to detect some kind of tampering somewhere else? Why go to all that trouble? Why not simply tamper and make it look like hackers or something (I’m not even going to ask what this ‘tampering’ is supposed to be btw, because this is off the scale for crazyness)?
Well, again, you misunderstand (shocking I know) what I’m getting at. I’m quite sure the US government DOES monitor all manner of traffic both data, voice and video as well as lots of other stuff. The point is that try as they might, they won’t be able to hear or catch ALL the traffic…which was what you said.
Dude…I can be ‘in’ YOUR network from where I sit. Or from Hong Kong or Timbuktu if I have an internet link. Those networks are public networks with public traffic traversing it.
No…you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about so you THINK I’m overlooking those things. I’m well aware of exactly where those cables are…since they are in red on a map not 20 feet from my office.
Have you been living under a rock for the last 30 years or have you never heard the term ‘hackers’ before? The traffic traversing those links is on a PUBLIC DATA NETWORK! Hell’s bells…if it was on a private network I’m guessing the Government could hack in if they really wanted to. And most likely without the company aware of it. You figure that 12 year old kids can break into this kind of stuff but that the US government can’t?? Good grief!
No, it wouldn’t. It could be coincidence. Or it COULD be a fuckup at the ISP’s themselves. Or it COULD be an actual systematic attack to disrupt service. What it is probably not is a sooper sekrit squirrel attempt to tap into the network…nor a prelude to a Rambo style US attack on Iran.
-XT
If it’s intelligence, it’s incompetent. It’s messy, it’s disruptive, and it is very, very public. What’s more, it isn’t required to do anything useful. Inspector Clouseau would be embarrassed to have had a hand in it.
If it’s disruption, it’s fairly good if someone takes responsibility. Being able to disrupt this much, this quickly takes whatever game you’re playing to a new level. It’s enough to make people pay attention to you. However, nobody can listen if nobody knows your name.
I’m unconvinced at this point that the cuts are uber nefarious, but you seem to not be understanding what he is saying.
Okay I have a working high density fiber optic line. If I cut into the line and install a signal catcher/repeater a whole bunch of people will no that the line was cut and it will look hinky.
If I cut the line underwater no signals are being sent on the line. So when I, in the safety of my secret sewer villain lair cut the line to install my signal catcher/repeater no one notices.
Although it would seem that compromising one of the existing signal repeaters might be a better idea, but maybe those are checked regularly.
First, it’s YOUR assumption that it’s the US. And second of all, why not go to that much trouble ? Is minimalism something you associate with the US government ?
Unless, of course, they has access to a choke point for all that data - like, say, a cable it all goes through.
If it worked like that, they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble they did with arranging physical access here in America. Apparently, the people who actually do this sort of thing for a living disagree with you.
Repeating “sooper sekrit” over and over doesn’t make you any less of an apologist.
This is a shameful description of the USS Jimmy Carter.
Well I was installing the tapping equipment on land you see… The proud Jimmie just provided the distraction.
The point I was trying (obviously unsuccessfully) to make is that the third alternative is you can capture the traffic without doing either. You don’t need to go to all that trouble if your intention is to snoop the lines.
Off the top of my head I’d say the best way to do it is to simply hack into their network and put in agent that will either mirror the traffic back to your own facility in some round about way (generating a ton of traffic) or, put in an agent (sort of like a virus) that scans for interesting tid bits and then encrypts and compresses that traffic and sends THAT back across the public network with no one the wiser. I’m sure the government, with it’s pretty much unlimited budget, can and has come up with something a lot better.
Putting some kind of capture in line is about the stupidest way you could go. Either you’d need to put in some kind of recording device and then go back to see what the take is from time to time, or you’d need to put in some kind of alternative way to signal (radio/microwave or perhaps satellite) which would be a bit obvious. Or you’d have to attempt to mirror the traffic on a link across that same link…which is probably going to be a bit obvious as well to anyone with a network traffic analyzer (which I assure you all ISPs have).
-XT
Well, it’s you…of COURSE my first assumption is that it is the evil US doing it.
Why not go to that much trouble? Because, as I thought I’d explained, it would be going to a lot of UNNECESSARY trouble as you could do exactly what you seem to think they want WITHOUT CUTTING THE CABLE. Even if we assume it’s not the US, I can’t think of any country that could actually benefit from that data AND has the capability to do something with it doing it that way. It’s a brute force approach…and a STUPID brute force approach.
You really haven’t a clue how the internet works do you? The traffic going into those links is still routing on their networks…even the voice traffic since it’s probably been encapsulated in an IP header. You don’t need to sit in between the link to see the traffic…unless of course you think that router A on one end of the link is sending sooper sekrit data to router B at the other end and that is as far as the data is going.
(and yeah, for those of you with a clue about this stuff I know that there are multiple routers and that they are probably using an upper layer switch doing ATM…I’m trying to keep this simple)
Show me someone who actually knows what they are talking about and more importantly grasps what I am talking about who disagrees with what I’m saying and then we’ll talk.
I’m an apologist because you don’t understand what I’m talking about? Well, um…ok.
-XT
Here’s something else: Iran was supposed to open its Euro-denominated Oil Bourse in the next week or so (coinciding with the anniversary of the Revolution). One expects this could delay such an opening, for at least a few days/weeks.
Of course, they’ve been missing missing opening deadlines for several years now, so I doubt anyone’s holding their breath.
By the way, it appears we’re up to five cables now:
Actually, it’s unclear if 5 were cut, or if it was just 4 and Asma Ali Zain can’t write very well, since he lists SeaMeWe-4 twice, and doesn’t clarify if it’s the same cable or two different cables/sections.
I saw the same thing. It LOOKS like one of the cables was cut multiple times, and that either 3 or 4 cables were cut. Two in close proximity. It’s still hard to say if this was deliberate.
If it wasn’t then my guess is that someone out there in bad guy land has looked up and seen the potential. This has caused billions of dollars in losses and has seriously affected millions of internet users (not to mention the phone disruptions). My guess is that all of the ISPs that have long haul links are now starting to think about backup strategies that they hadn’t considered before.
(not that I’m gleefully rubbing my hands together in anticipation of potential new contracts for my company or anything…)
-XT
Does your company own any submarines?
lol, no. We do some of that layer 1 stuff but we do network engineering and can provide alternatives for backups to their links. And we do work in that region of the world so it’s more than possible I may be making a trip sometime in the near future.
-XT
I just ran across this lovely pdf:
Worldwide Trends in Submarine Cable System Faults
It turns out that, as of 2000-2003, over 70% of all cable faults are due to “external aggression.” Of these faults, over 50% are due to fishing, 18% or so due to anchors. Geological events account for about 5% of these faults.
The fault rate per thousand kilometers of cable runs at about 0.02 for cables deeper than 1000 meters. It increases above 1000 meters to the point where 80% of all faults occur at depths less than 200 meters.
Now if we can just learn where this present crop of faults occurred, we can figure out how odd the events are.
Perhaps it was edited later, but this sounds like five cuts on four lines to me. No?
We need to stop kidding ourselves.
Somebody is prepping something big.
RE: the “Global Guerrillas” concept?