Re: Internet FUD Abound

[Jeremy Porter <jerry () fc net>]

If a coordinated terrorist attack took out enough telecom infrustucture
to partition the Net, I'd be worry about things like 911 capacity,
long distance trunking capacity, the ability of certain bank and
federal networks to survive.  Frankly the concequeses of the
colaterial damage would be worse, think about the number of
international circuits going through places like 60 Hudson.

It would be far less cost and risk to impelement the attacks Sean
hints at than, physical attacks.  And its not the routers that
are most at risk.
Fortunatly the most dangerous attacks require an active and ongoing
effort to maintain, thus descreasing the total time this type of
activity and go on sucessfully.  Taking down one site or flooding
it or whatever is easy.  Sustaining a cooridated ongoing denial
of service attack would be difficult to get away with for long.

In message <20000727001408.4514.cpmta () c004 sfo cp net>, Sean Donelan writes:
> Secondly, must of the popular discussion (i.e. comments from the FBI's
> National Information Protection Center, SRI's Atomic Tangerine, etc) has
> used the article to support the theory the net is very vulnerable to
> terroristic attacks.  However, destroying 2.5% of the nodes in the Internet
> is a big number.  Its not just a matter of blowing up a parking garage
> outside Washington DC, a Gigaswitch in San Jose, etc.  Launching a
> coordinated attack against 25, 250, 2500 different physical locations
> worldwide is hard for even an organized military operation.
>
> If terrorists blew up the top 2.5% of the largest cities in the USA,
> would the country would break up into feudal segements.  I don't know.
> I agree things would be very grim if 2.5% of the cities were destroyed.
> But that is not small terroristic attack.  I don't think the article
> supports the notion the Internet is exceptionally vulnerable to physical
> attack by terrorists.  Actually, I think the article supports exactly
> the opposite view, it takes a rather large physical attack to partition
> the net.
>
> On the other hand, I think the current operational practices make the
> net less resiliant to certain forms of attack.  But that is a different
> discussion.

--- jerry () fc net

512-519-6193 www.wayport.net
8303 Mopac Expressway Suite A300, Austin Tx.