Severed Fiber Optic Cables Disrupted Internet Access In Parts of Eastern Europe, Iran and Turkey (bbc.com) 44
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Severed fibre optic cables disrupted internet access in parts of eastern Europe, Iran and Turkey on Thursday. The issue, which lasted for about two hours, was caused by multiple fibre cables being physically cut at the same time, a highly unusual thing to happen. Google said its services were among those unavailable in the region for about 30 minutes. The company told internet service providers to connect to its other servers to "route around the problem."
In a statement, the company blamed "multiple simultaneous fibre cuts," which are very rare. BBC Monitoring confirmed that internet access in Bulgaria, Iran and Turkey had been disrupted for about two hours on Thursday morning. Sadjad Bonabi, a director at Iran's Communications Infrastructure Company, said two cuts happened at once, one between Iran and Bucharest and the other on a line to Munich. This disrupted traffic on one of the major fibre cables in the region. But Mr Bonabi said traffic had been routed on to "healthy" connections in western and southern Iran. No explanation for the cut cables has been offered.
In a statement, the company blamed "multiple simultaneous fibre cuts," which are very rare. BBC Monitoring confirmed that internet access in Bulgaria, Iran and Turkey had been disrupted for about two hours on Thursday morning. Sadjad Bonabi, a director at Iran's Communications Infrastructure Company, said two cuts happened at once, one between Iran and Bucharest and the other on a line to Munich. This disrupted traffic on one of the major fibre cables in the region. But Mr Bonabi said traffic had been routed on to "healthy" connections in western and southern Iran. No explanation for the cut cables has been offered.
Somebody had a tantrum yesterday (Score:1)
My guess is someone was in a bad mood yesterday for whatever reason and took their frustrations out by ordering an attack on Iran's communication infrastructure. Turkey and Eastern Europe were collateral damage.
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No, the Mossad does the repair work. Everyone thinks it's the cutting that puts a tap in the lines, but the tap is inserted at repair.
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fiber team three (Score:4, Interesting)
The third team goes in after the first team cuts and installs the taps somewhere else while the signal is off for a known reason and lets the repair team know covertly when it's OK to turn back on.
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I assume it comes down to cost. You have to encrypt each wavelength (DWDM), and since the price for optical encryption doesn't appear to be published anywhere I also assume it is expensive as hell.
One can get some clue however:
https://www.insight.com/en_US/... [insight.com]
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I thought the taps were attached to the outside of the cable without cutting it?
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Re:Somebody had a tantrum yesterday (Score:4, Interesting)
One method is to bend the cable and extract enough light to sniff out the data. "You can get these little cylindrical devices off eBay for about $1,000. You run the cable around the cylinder, causing a slight bend in cable. It will emit a certain amount of light, one or two decibels. That goes into the receiver and all that data is stolen in one or two decibels of light. Without interrupting transfer flow, you can read everything going on on an optical network," said Everett. The loss is so small, said Everett, that anyone who notices it might attribute it to a loose connection somewhere along the line. "They wouldn't even register someone's tapping into their network," he added.
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Not quite. What they do is to pull a section of the cable into an enclosure (special purpose diving bell in the case of submarine cables). Technicians then strip the protective layers and sheathing off of the individual fibers without cutting them. They wrap each uncut bare fiber around a special spool, which causes some of the light to leak out the sides. So the fiber cores aren't cut and alarms based upon the loss of signal won't work. But it is still possible to detect changes in attenuation or use inter
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The "older" bending loop while in use tech attempt could be detected as installed?
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I know (Score:1)
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I was just thinking I saw an article recently about russia having an "internet cable spy ship" in the atlantic.
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Why not? The US had one in the Pacific. A former co-worked worked for Raytheon when they tapped the Vladivostok cable during the Cold War.
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Why shouldn't the Russians have a cable tapping operation, since the US and British (and undoubtedly others) do?
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Misunderstood. I thought you were implying that this was something new that no one else did.
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It's pretty obvious who did it... https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
And how the f*ck did that ship fly out of the Atlantic and traverse the whole l of Europe under the radar (is it Stealthy too?) land near Kalotina at the Serbian border and dig through the fiber. By god, isn't anti-Russian russophobic rabid paranoya a dangerous brain rotting disease or what? You should apply a bit for brain next time before listening to imbeciles what cannot even spell two words in the language of the "Enemy" they are defending us against: https://www.fagain.co.uk/node/... [fagain.co.uk]
1. There are roa
Russia? (Score:3, Insightful)
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It'd make a convenient false flag, wouldn't it?
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I rather wonder why that was news, since the US has been doing the same thing since at least the Cold War. A former coworker worked for Raytheon on their early robotics project and was on the sub that cut and tapped the Vladivostok cable in the '80s.
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You don't need to cut a copper cable ... your story is bollocks. You just wrap some wires around it ...
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The incident they're talking about, they cut the sheath which for all purposes is cutting the cable. It's fairly well documented both in US intelligence information and in late varona file information when the USSR finally caught on. Copper phone lines are inherently a DC system, and the further you get from the transmission office the further the degrading and signal strength loss you get, which means direct contact with the wire itself. Now think of that, you're talking about a major outbound trunk tha
Cut details, please? (Score:1)
Two lines cut are mentioned - is it happening at the same physical spot, or is synchronized at several?
NSA and GCHQ (Score:1)
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Do most advance nations and their telco brands know what to look for over a decade and the sudden "change" when the network gets a NSA sub visit while in use?
Is it now best practice to have a dark network while installing/upgrading global collection?
Can a review of past data show the location of past loop bends and sub visits?
"connect to other servers... (Score:2)
to route around the problem."
this is a *manual* operation?
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No explanation for the cut cables has been offered (Score:3)
The explanation is pretty simple.
You cut the cable at a point the owner will find and fix.
Then you cut it somewhere in the middle, insert your listening device, and wait until they fix the other cut.
Now: you can listen in ...