We had some serious industrial espionage in the Bay Area yesterday

Submitted by marccanter on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 11:02.

As some of you may have heard, there was some serious industrial espionage yesterday in the Bay Area.  Vandals broke into two infrastructure conduit manhole covers and hacked through the Urban Ring for the Bay Area - cutting it in four places.

This act was done to take down all the wireless calls for both AT&T and Verizon and interupted MOST of the data centers and hosting facilitiies in teh Bay Area!  911 servcies were down, all cell phones from verizona nd AT&T were down in the South Bay area - and many many hosting facilities were completely 'off air!'

Most of the large tech companies have redundant systems running around the world, but the smaller players - like my company - were taken down as we do NOT have redundant systems running in other cities!

So we were off line for 10 hours!

AT&T is offering $100k for info leading to the arrest of these folks and it's clear they knew what they were doing. They strategically cut the  urban ring who's ONLY purpose is to inter-connect between all the OTHER urban rings and trunk lines that fan out across the country.

So ALL traffic coming into and out of the Bay Area was effected.

ALL traffic.

Quite a day yesterday.

Real wake up call for redundancy.  And in true insider blogsphere action - turns out AT&T used Twitter during the crisis.

:-)

( categories: )

OMG

 

Wow...any estimates on the economic fall-out?

24 meets the real world

Wow - this could be anyone and for any reason - a government (including ours) stopping communications or transactions just to block one call or transaction or to steal $ billions or bankrupt a company we don't even know exists...

Lots of interesting possibilities... look forward to learning more!

Disrupt IT

INFRASTRUCTURE SABOTAGE PC OF CAKE

From the public reports, it appears that all that protected the fiber were  man hole covers - which only take a tire iron, shovel, or crow bar (I have done it with 2 screwdrivers) to lift open.

So much for homeland security.  

And our electric grid control has also recently been breeched.  

Not a problem.