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Fourth Undersea Cable Taken Offline In Less Than a Week
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Feb 04, 2008 12:36 AM
from the bad-week-to-be-a-backbone-cable dept.
from the bad-week-to-be-a-backbone-cable dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.
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[+]
Millions in Middle East Lose Internet 304 comments
Shipwack writes "Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.
The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.
Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with Egypt's communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe."
[+]
Hardware: Third Undersea Cable Cut 655 comments
Many readers are reporting that another undersea fiber optic cable has been cut, apparently caused by another wayward anchor. It looks like Iran has completely lost Internet connectivity."
[+]
Hardware: The Effects of the Fibre Outage Throughout the Mediterranean 101 comments
Umar Kalim writes "Analysts have been studying the effects of the fibre outage throughout the Mediterranean in terms of network performance, by examining the changes in packet losses, latencies and throughput. We initially discussed the outage yesterday. 'It is interesting that some countries such as Pakistan were mainly unaffected, despite the impact on neighboring countries such as India. This contrasts dramatically to the situation in June - July 2005, when due to a fibre cut of SEAMEWE3 off Karachi, Pakistan lost all terrestrial Internet connectivity which resulted, in many cases, in a complete 12 day outage of services. This is a tribute to the increased redundancy of international fibre connectivity installed for Pakistan in the last few years.'"
Submission: Fourth Undersea Cable Cut by Anonymous Coward
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Satellite IDs Ships That Cut Cables 186 comments
1sockchuck writes "Undersea telecom cable operator Reliance Globalcom was able to use satellite images to identify two ships that dropped anchor in the wrong place, damaging submarine cables and knocking Middle East nations offline in early February. The company used satellite images to study the movements of the two ships, and shared the information with officials in Dubai, who impounded the two vessels. The NANOG list has a discussion of where Reliance might have obtained satellite images to provide that level of detail. Google News links more coverage of the developments."
[+]
The Men Who Fix the Internet 162 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Remember all those undersea cables breaking? PopSci.com introduces John Rennie, who '... has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by UK-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie — a congenial, 6'4", 57-year-old Scotsman — patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables.' The article goes on to outline the physical infrastructure of the Internet, including some of its points of vulnerability."
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Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't think this is either a precursor to military action, or a direct attack on Iran's about-to-launch Euro-based oil market?
4 cuts, as far as I am concerned, is no co-incidence. I literally expect to turn on the TV and see bombs falling any day now. Economy down, turn up the war machine. It really is a common historical sequence.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=JES20080202&articleId=7980 [globalresearch.ca]
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Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Interesting)
As suspicious as it looks, I think it's just really, really bad luck. But then again, maybe I need to get with the times and be a little more paranoid.
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Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Interesting)
Al-Qaeda's main enemy is not the US. It is Arab countries who are not conservative enough. 9-11 was about getting the US out of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA,) not about freedom or anything a vague as that. If Al-Qaeda was able to cut off Internet service to the KSA, UAE, Qatar, and etc. that would be a huge coup for Al-Qaedi. What do they object to? They object to, anything that allows people to question their limited ultra-wahabi dogma. Currently UAE is the official named target of Al-Qaeda's wrath.
Don't forget the largest US base in the region is in Qatar.
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Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of the respective populations are not irrational, psychotic and unstable.
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Re:Cue... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis... it doesn't even have to agree with me.
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be political suicide indeed, for a politician to start a war shortly before an election -- in which he was running. Bush isn't.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow i have a Deja Vu sense...
I bet EUR 100 (to be donated to Doctors without borders) that before this year runs out, we will have another major war with another country.
Anybody willing to dare?
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Funny)
You do know where you are, right?
it doesn't even have to agree with me.
Ah, I see the answer may be yes.
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Politicians rarely tell you their point of view, or what they are really going to do. They tell you what you want to hear. Can you point me to any Iranian actions that support a "threat" scenario? I don't care for politicians' words anymore, usually it's opinion making and swaying, but little if any substance.
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as ironic is the fact that even though they didn't fight in Gulf War II, Iran won the war.
The U.S. has lost because we have failed to achieve our major strategic objectives -to create a stable, Western-style democracy in Iraq and beat back Islamic terrorism- and instead we have been left weaker in every single way. We have no credibility and no allies, so we're weak on the diplomatic front. Our military is overextended and its readiness to fight another war has been reduced. We're poorer, by about a trillion dollars.
Iran wins because two of their major strategic objectives have been achieved: the threat of Iraq and the threat of the U.S. have both been neutralized. Iraq is no longer a threat, because Saddam has been deposed, the military is destroyed, and the new government is Shiite, and too weak to stand up to Iran. The United States is no longer a threat: we can't use diplomacy against Iran, because even if we had proof they were up to something, no one will believe us, and few of our allies will back us up because we're so unpopular abroad. We can't use military force, because we don't have the troops to spare, and again it's unlikely we could get any other countries to assist in a military effort. We do have aircraft and cruise missiles, so in theory we could use airstrikes. But if we try anything, they can use the Shiite militias to attack our forces in Iraq and stir up the civil war there, so even a limited air war with Iran would be tough. Finally, any major conflict with Iran would threaten the oil supply, and with it, the world economy.
So we won't attack Iran, because we can't. And Iran knows it. Their president is a belligerent idiot, they harass our destroyers with their gunboats, they kidnap British seamen, and they send arms to Iraqi insurgents, and they continue to pursue nuclear weapons, all because they know there's not a god damn thing the U.S. can do about it. These are not the actions of a country that is afraid of imminent invasion.
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Cue... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here are the ways in which we lost:
1. We didn't stabilize the country.
- This assumes we didn't want a never-ending civil war in Iraq. Not necessarily the case.
2. We didn't get a Western-style democracy installed.
- When have we ever executed regime-change and actually let the people decide who the new leader was? I don't think there is any precedent to believe that's what we really wanted.
3. We didn't fight terrorism.
- I thought it was common knowledge that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Saddam didn't like Al Queda, nor did he like their radical Islamic influence on his secular government. They were enemies.
4. We didn't prevent additional radicals from becoming terrorists.
- Assumes we don't want a never-ending War on Terror. I thought people like McCain have declared we are destined to have one anyway. Relates to number 5.
5. We spent loads of money.
- Only a problem to those that spent it. Not to those that received it. People heavily invested in the defense industry profit from war. People like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and most of the rest of this administration. All made big profits from the war. Also, preventing these uncontrolled dictators like Saddam from doing something outrageous like nationalizing the oil fields can be prevented, enhancing oil profits. Most of the same people profit.
6. We will need to occupy Iraq for decades.
- Perhaps we wanted to build those bases in a very strategic oil-heavy region.
7. We lost many soldier's lives.
- Only matters if they're your children. I don't see many Bush-Jr.'s in Iraq, do you?
From that perspective, we are winning.
Parent
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Funny)
Hm, remind me again, which country are you talking about here?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Other possibilities (Score:3, Interesting)
There are other possibilities. Recall that the FBI shut down [bbc.co.uk] Muslim websites hosted in Texas on Sep. 7, 2001. Depending on who you think was responsible for 9/11, it could have either been a futile attempt to prevent 9/11, or a successful attempt to keep Muslims from organizing a peaceful or violent protest against being blamed for 9/11. Since I am in the latter camp, I was pleasantly surprised that the Superbowl we
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
These are obviously failed attempts to tap internet traffic.
The NSA has long been rumored to be able to live splice [zdnet.com]
undersea fibre optic cables.
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah... if bombs were about to start falling, their internal communications would be the targets--not their international connections. What are they doing to do, send an email to call for help to repel an attack? Plus the communications would be attacked pretty much simultaneously to an attack--not days ahead of the attack.
I'd agree that someone is deliberately doing this, but I don't think it's the U.S. and I don't think it's a precursor to an attack on Iran. There's just very little military value in
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't think this is either a precursor to military action, or a direct attack on Iran's about-to-launch Euro-based oil market?
4 cuts, as far as I am concerned, is no co-incidence. I literally expect to turn on the TV and see bombs falling any day now. Economy down, turn up the war machine. It really is a common historical sequence.
Parent
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Funny)
"People of Earth, Your attention please..."
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think this is the U.S. The U.S. would make sure to cut all the cables at once, therefore ensuring maximum disruption and surprise at the time of the attack. The way this is being done is slow and relatively uncoordinated. Which suggests either a probing maneuver or a lack of resources.
The U.S. is fairly straightforward with its objectives. The brass doesn't like taking things slowly when it comes to war. The plan is to get in, blow stuff up, rebuild the critical infrastructure, then leave. It doesn't always work that way (e.g. Iraq), but it is the ideal scenario that every General and Admiral desires. Long and protracted wars are far too costly. Not just to the U.S. itself, but also on a personal level for the brass.
Which raises the question: Who would gain from slowly cutting international Internet access in the Middle East? The myriad of plausible answers contrasted with the lack of any solid suspects scares me a hell of a lot more than any U.S. military operations. IMHO, it's in the best interest of the U.S. to find out what is going on NOW. Something big may be coming down the pipeline in the middle east. If and when it comes, it's not going to be pleasant.
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War is never straight (Score:3, Insightful)
Also in terms of any intelligence related action (Score:5, Insightful)
What you don't do is send in some guy to much with it, take their communications down, then do nothing, then still do nothing as they fix it and start to work on alleviating the problem in the future. That is even less useful than just leaving it alone.
As a precursor to military action, something like this makes sense only if idiots are running the show. Not only is it going to do no real good (who gives a shit if civilians can't get on the Internet? It is the internal military links that are the issue) but it makes it less likely that any sort of complete blackout would be achieved. I guarantee the companies involved in this aren't just going to fix the cable and go "Ok well that'll probably never happen again." They are going to try and figure out why this happened, and what can be done to prevent it.
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Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Operation Desert Storm [wikipedia.org]
Operation Urgent Fury [wikipedia.org]
History rarely remembers the successful campaigns. Mostly, we remember the screw-ups. Unfortunately, the brass remembers it the other way around.
Parent
Could be war -- or an attempt at self-isolation (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The cable was not cut - Bad summary, bad! (Score:5, Informative)
> the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents.
Re:The cable was not cut - Bad summary, bad! (Score:5, Funny)
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Cable Not Cut; Cable Merely 'Damaged' (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to run against the whole "this could mean only one thing" meme, but I think it's just as likely that some old hardware sitting at the ends of that cable got stressed past its breaking point because having the other links down finally pushed it past its limits.
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Re:The cable was not cut - Bad summary, bad! (Score:4, Informative)
Back-atcha. The article states that the cable may be offline due to power problem, not that it was taken offline. A rather significant difference. If you don't mind, I'm going to privately freak a bit until we find out who or what caused all these outages. If it's just incompetence, I'll be a happy panda. (Not to mention rolling my eyes at the all-to-common situation.) If it's more than just that...
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action. The fourth? The fourth is a testament to the Internet's ability to withstand damage. Even if it is the coincidence out of the bunch, that doesn't preclude enemy action. Quite the contrary, I'm afraid.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh no. (Score:5, Funny)
The last safe spot for the network admin has been found - and destroyed.
Testing the system.. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you are a terrorist and you want to cause mass chaos. How would you do it?
You'd most likely want to create some form of confusion or distraction before hitting your main target.
I'd think this a precursor to a bigger plot. If I was thinking along these lines I'd be cutting them and seeing what the end results are. If I could label and see which ones do what and invoke certain responses then I'd wait before doing it again. The next time I'd probably create something that acted via a timer. This way I could attack, destroy communications, then attack again creating chaos and confusion. Through a very specific set time.
However, the counter arguement here is that anything they can do to the LAN cables we could easily counter-act with wireless transmission as Satellites are more than capable of carrying the necessary data for communication. This pretty much only isolates the European world from the internet, which isn't going to do much on the grand scheme of things.
The Plot is probably thicker but not much by my guess. Unless the NSA is using the downtime to break the cable elsewhere and run off thier own data spying cable via the lines. I doubt it..
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Order of Battle (Score:5, Informative)
1. Attack the plan - Futility
2. Attack the alliances - Division
3. Attack the resources - Frustration
4. Attack the army in the field - Attrition
5. Attack the cities - Destruction
The costs increase with each step, which is why the cities are last. Good, proactive intellegence and operatives can prevent things from happening. If not, they can foul things up so they can't happen. Communications is a resource, so it looks like step 3 is on the table.
New tricks by AT&T ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess this means... (Score:5, Funny)
Cloverfield Promo? (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, we're all getting bored of the alternate reality web thingies these films do to hype themselves before release, so it sort of makes sense to kick it up a notch (bam!)
Iran's Oil Bourse (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it a coincidence?
I think not.
Four Reasons No TAP (Score:5, Insightful)
They could someone reroute some of the data on the cable and even use stolen or leased lines on the existing cable for their purpose... but they couldn't steal all of the signal without a way of back hauling home (to their office).
England has always spied on all the data it could get its hands on and the US and every other country that can, probably does as well..
My guess if these cuts are connected it's more to force the data to route through specific nodes that anything else, and as I have said elsewhere since phone calls run on these same cables, they might not be even after internet data. Perhaps someone wants to catch someone calling home...
Fun with Bayes (Score:4, Interesting)
Today we are going to use Bayes's theorem to determine the likelihood that all of this disabling of cables is malicious. We are not calculating the likelihood of conspiracy, just how likely it is that someone out there is disabling cables with ill purpose. (Of course, how many people does it take to disable or cut a cable with malicious intent? One? Two? More than one is by definition a conspiracy.)
First, we need a prior. Lets assume that the likelihood that someone is out there was planning to maliciously disable a cable before this latest round of disabling was about 0.0001. That's going to be our prior, 0.0001. Not very likely, and hopefully not too contentious. At this point, it doesn't really matter too much what the prior is, just that we have one. We'll see that after a few rounds of calculations, this prior washes out pretty quickly.
Now, lets assume that any time a cable is disabled, it is only about a 1% chance that said cable was disabled with malicious intent. Considering that historically these cables are cut or disabled only once a year, this assumption means that every 100 years, some asshole (or some assholes, for the tin foil hat crowd) is going to go out there and maliciously disable a cable. I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation. I mean, every hundred years, someone burns a church, or knocks over a skyscraper with a plane, or invades a country for no good reason whatsoever. Could these cables be special in that regard? For the sake of argument, lets assume they are not special and are subject to the once-in-a-hundred-year rule.
Now, we need to guess how likely it is that, if someone (or some people, for the conspiracy theorists) is indeed disabling cables maliciously, how many cables could he (or they, for the conspiracy theorists), cut per day? I'm thinking 0.5. In other words, every other day this person or people could cut a cable. The 0.5 number means that it is easy for a properly motivated entity who also has the proper means to cut cables.
Remember, there is only a 1/365 chance that a cable will be cut on any given day due to an accident. We'll need to remember this to calculate the posteriors after a cable wasn't disabled back on Day 3.
Okay, if we are all on agreement on the numbers so far, we are ready to do some Bayesian arithmetic to determine the likelihood of malicious intent.
Day 0 (before any cables disabled): 0.0001 likelihood
Day 1 (cable disabled): 0.0476644 likelihood
Day 2 (cable disabled): 0.7144896 likelihood
Day 3 (NO disabling): 0.5444762 likelihood
Day 4 (cable disabled): 0.9835428 likelihood
Day 5 (cable disabled): 0.9996654 likelihood
In conclusion, the same math that runs your spam filter predicts (99.967% likely) that someone is up to something disabling all of these cables. Conversely, we have only a 0.033% expectation that all this disabling is coincidental [slashdot.org].
Re:Fun with Bayes (Score:4, Insightful)
All of them. But since you're asking me specifically, let's go through it:
But let's talk about the rationale for his analysis for a second. First of all, he assumes that cable failures are independent events and are randomly distributed. But is there a good reason to do this? What if they aren't. What if failures in one cables increase the likelihood of failures in other cables a la the New York City Blackout of 2006. Furthermore, what about seismic events? In 2006, six Asian undersea cables were disabled in a two-day period. He could have similarly made some bullshit analysis then--coming up with an even more "certain" result, making it seem as if a conspiracy was afoot--despite the fact that the failures were, in fact, the result of natural phenomenon, the Hengchun earthquake [wikipedia.org].
Quite simply, in the absence of objective data, I wouldn't. Computing a probability based upon made-up numbers usually just gives you the answer that you assumed to be true all along. You might as well follow your intuition, at that point, and not kid yourself with fake probabilities and statistics.
I don't disagree with Bayes' theorem (or Occam's Razor), jackass. I disagree with using it incorrectly in an intellectually lazy way to try and "prove" a half-baked notion. My spam filter uses hundreds of thousands of objective datapoints to accurately identify spam. It's programmers didn't just program four datapoints of what they thought spam would look like and then call it a day. How effective do you think it would be if they had? Then why are you giving so much credence to this guy's "work."
-Grym
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Re:deliberate? still don't think so (Score:5, Funny)
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