In a hundred mile area ranging from Monterey to San Jose, Thursday April 9th was a quiet day. In fact, to repeat a cliche, it was “too quiet”.   Shortly after midnight, technically saavy vandals attacked 8 fiber optic backbone lines in Morgan Hill, cutting virtually ALL communication in the region.  Land lines, Cellular service, credit card processing, ATM communications, fire & security alarms and Internet service were wiped out, with eight well placed cuts.

The technical knowledge necessary to pull this off is in some ways limited to employees of telephone companies, but in many ways is also as publicly available as calling the “Call Before You Dig” number that provides information about underground infrastructure.

Before the breakup of the Bells, AT&T made it a practice of running it’s cables in rings around cities, allowing for rerouting to successfully overcome accidental cuts. This incident leads us to wonder if that’s still the case. Bruce Perens reports that the attackers basically created a black hole where communications, with the exception of radio, just didn’t exist.

I’ve personally  been pointing out the suceptability of our infrastructure, informational,  electrical, and natural gas, since before the 9/11 attacks.   It came home to me during the May 8, 1988 Illinois Bell Central Office Fire in Hinsdale, IL.   The Central Office in Hinsdale was a peering point for long distance carriers, the cellular system, Air Traffic Control voice and data for 3 major Air Traffic Control Centers, and when fire wiped out that central office, over 100 thousand local residents were without phone service, cellular service was disabled for most of Chicago, and long distance into and out of the area was virtually decimated.  The reason why all these things failed, even with the phone company’s much vaunted redundant systems, had to do with a lack of geographic diversity.  All the mission critical services ran through the same central office.

In the case of the Morgan Hill incident, the media has said virtually nothing, and I personally wonder if this important lesson is getting to the necessary people at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as state emergency management agencies.

While all of these services were effectively disabled, there has been no indication as to any specific target that may have been attacked.   There was no particular increase in theft, nor any other incidents that would have been enabled by disabling alarms.

On the other hand, the impact of this outage shook the affected communities to their roots.  Cash was the order of the day, since ATMs and credit card processing were unavailable, leading to significant shortages of cash.

The frightening effects included one hospital’s internal network becoming unusable because of an unexpected dependency on external resources.

The only communications that were left working in the affected area were two way radios, and to provide additional radio capacity, amateur radio operators were brought in to provide communications for critical services, providing communications between the E911 centers and the hospitals in the area.

Some of the important points to take away from this incident are:

1. Cloud based software as a service (SAAS) applications are useless if you can’t reach the cloud.
2. Redundancy only works if it’s geographically dispersed.
3. 2 way radios are essential… No matter how sexy that Cell phone with “push-to-talk” walkie-talkie mode is, it’s not going to work when the cellular infrastructure is down.
4. Access to critical infrastructure MUST be secured.  If they can lift the man hole cover and cut the fiber, it’s not secured.