Undersea Cables Cut: Oops or Uh-oh?

Someone just tried to hack my PC while reading the post here, Thankfully I have a great firewall. I know a guy in Thailand and he is still on line so what gives? I will ask him as he is an expert with the Internet.

I know right now everyone seems to be pointing there finger at the US for cutting the cables,but could it be Iran ? Just because a cable was cut at sea does not mean that any military networks Iran has operating in there country are down. If the US wanted to shut down Iran's computer networks I'm sure we could figure out a way of doing just that without cutting a cable. I'm sure the computer warfare budget of the US is quite a bit larger than Iran's. That being said; if your survival depended on your networks being operational and you did not have complete faith that your firewalls could defend against an attack, would you pull the plug denying your attackers access to your network ?

reply to post by the crazed one


I think this is another scenario that should be looked into. Cutting cables is a disruption but it wouldn't cease the network of the country as they re-route through neighbours networks.

One of the best ways of disrupting major services is Denial of Service attacks & this could be a possible cause for the cutting of cables.
Denial of Service attacks are initiated by using dumb terminals around the world to send lots of information to one particular service which overloads it & thus causes the service to go offline.

These dumb terminals are unsuspecting home users who unknown to them have Trojan horses sitting on their machines awaiting instructions from a host. When that host then initiates the attack the home user’s machine starts sending as much data as is possible from that internet line, to the victim of the attack. So with millions of computers infected with these Trojans the amount of data being sent is huge.

en.wikipedia.org...

Now there is a single point of failure to the internet as we know it & that is the root DNS servers. Again just in case people aren't aware of what these servers do here's a brief explanation.
Each connected system to the internet whether your PC with its modem or router or a company through its leased line has what is known as an IP address, this number is the identifier to each system & is in the format of 192.168.100.100 this is just an example.
What the DNS servers do is when you type www.abovetopsecret.com it resolves this simple name to the IP Address of that service which in this case is 75.126.76.151
Now there are millions of DNS servers around the world but they are all governed by only 13 root servers which are all housed in the U.S.
en.wikipedia.org...

The root DNS servers were attacked previously & they brought down 7 of them this was back in 2002.
www.internetnews.com...

Now what if such a massive attack was formulated to attack a crucial service like the root DNS servers, but this time more a concentrated attack then it would bring down the internet as we know it, albeit possibly only temporarily.

So if the intelligence networks knew that something was about to be initiated & with the vast majority of dumb terminals being held in Asia & the middle east then perhaps this was the reason they cut the lines.

I'm not so sure if it would be the root DNS servers that would be the targets as the DNS servers scattered around the globe would sustain the records of most services until the root DNS servers came back online.

But perhaps another just as critical service was about to be attacked.

Who knows but it's another theory & there's no doubt in mind an attack by someone caused this. I work in IT infrastructure in the oil & gas sector & we had a recent case where my company’s services from the UK to Norway were down for a couple of days.

What had happened was that the company maintaing the subsea link hadn't realised that the backup cable had previously been damaged & when the main cable got damaged then we had no services until 1 of the cables was repaired.
So I can understand 1 or possibly 2 going down but 4 that's just not right.

You know how everyone says that the internet is impossible to stop


Did anyone stop and think they could erase it by cutting underwater cables? Or is that far fetched idea

I’m definitely leaning toward Uh-oh at this point. With the Iranian oil bourse due to crank up soon, and the Super bowl happening on Sunday (an enormous opportunity for a false flag event), we may be seeing information control like what happened just before 911(see below).

www.whatreallyhappened.com...

reply to post by 2ciewan

Yeah, we experienced the same trouble here in Alaska. I am the Webmaster & Network Technician for an agency governed by the Alaska Supreme Court, and we had weird DNS trouble all day today. When we'd type in a URL, half the time it would time-out while trying to "look up" the DNS record. I switched us over to another DNS server for our lookups, but we continued to experience this trouble.

Something is definitely going on with DNS, and it's got to be related to the scenario surrounding these cables. I imagine there must be new DNS information propagating world-wide now that the routes have changed, possibly causing the problem. Or new routing tables are propagating to all the routing/switching equipment world-wide, causing connections to time-out. Who knows, but there is definitely something happening here.

im back in the office in a few hours, ive been away for a couple of weeks.

Will dig a little deeper into the dns stuff when i get back, Dns is being really screwy.

I live in Alaska but I have seen minimal effects on the internet, I am guessing that if this is just a freak odds on chance of accidents at the very least it must be shaking up some hornets nests in the Middle East and I agree it is also an intelligence bonanza if there was a lot of AQ "chatter" being redirected and harvested.
I even thought that what if there was some attempts of hackers in Iran trying or even succeeding in attempts to disrupt utilities here in the US and we just decided to "unplug" them?

They have claimed recently they were willing to do just that, could this be our preemptive first strike?

Having worked in maritime insurance I assure the membership that the claims of lost anchors could be very real... as real as Dell laying off thousands after taking the Canadian taxpayer for a good tax free building in Ottawa. This many submarine cables failures so close together? Well the fleets are aging... anchors get dragged, chains break, undersea optical cables can be a bit delicate and fussy. The only players I don't trust in this story is the USA and the media.

I'm having zero problems today contacting "dot ir" sites. Pings are quick with only a few dropped packets. I checked about a half dozen sites - no problem. The streams on wwitv.com out of Iran are working too. Guess them there Iranian techs jus' better than the run of the mill... 'cept maybe the Qume-crew out of Seoul.

Cheers,

Vic

[edit on 2-2-2008 by V Kaminski]

maybe those people here in affected countries could run and paste a few results from traceroute to see where the traffic is going.

(in windows...)

start
run
type cmd
enter
type tracert www.abovetopsecret.com
enter

might show up something interesting.

personally, i have noticed that outlook express hotmail appears to have problems connecting the first time but is fine if pressing send & receive again, and also some pages in firefox 'appear' to be refreshing themselves... i keep seeing the blue progress bar appear at the bottom of the page when it never did that before)

Originally posted by mclarenmp4
Now there is a single point of failure to the internet as we know it & that is the root DNS servers.

Technically this is not true. There are several (13) DNS root servers so its not really a single point of failure. All 13 (possibly even slightly less) would need to fail in order to fully render DNS unavailable. Not to mention that caching would sustain some level of activity for a while.

Originally posted by mclarenmp4
Now there are millions of DNS servers around the world but they are all governed by only 13 root servers which are all housed in the U.S.

Not true. While the majority of root servers are located within the US several are located outside:

root-servers.org...

On another note many here need to understand that ping/traceroutes are not effective tools to gauge site availability. Many locations block ICMP for security reasons so just because a ping/traceroute fails means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

brill

[edit on 2-2-2008 by brill]

Saturday earthquake off Island in Iran in the Persian Gulf

Earthquake Report

A relatively strong earthquake measuring 4.9 on the Richter scale hit suburbs of Hendurabi island in the Persian Gulf, southern Iran, Saturday morning.

The seismological centers affiliated to the Geophysics Institute of Tehran University registered the quake at 09:03 hours local time (0533 GMT).

The epicenter of the tremor was an area measuring 26.39 degrees in latitude and 52.92 degrees in longitude to the west of the Kish island, the report said.

[edit on 2-2-2008 by DancedWithWolves]

Hmmmm Wasn't it this week that a hacker got into the US gov system? Didn't they even get into the Sec of Defence's office? I think I heard that on the US news... Anyone remember hearing that?

This is amazing stuff, timed perfectly with the FISA extension and the Iranian non-dollar oil futures trading. The earth quake could be the underground alien bases preparing for a surface trip mission for the Superbowl events.

Remember the Twighlight Zone episode "Monsters on Maple Street" ?

The aliens just tweaked the power grid a little and watched the humans self destruct, art imitates life imitates art.

Thank god none of this is real

Originally posted by TrueAmerican
Yeah, something seems to be up here. Did anyone see whether they stated how close in proximity all these cables are to each other? That could be very telling right there. If they are all running beside each other, that's one thing, but if they are all separated by some distance, then my red flags are going to go up.

Truth be told, I am a Telecommunications Expert. I have 17 years experience this year. Hard to grasp that concept. lol I have spent around half that in international networking and half that in domestic.

I can tell you this much.

The likelyhood of these all happening in close enough of a timespan is almost impossible, and the area isolated is of timely significance, as well as surprising since a lot of routes are redundant without human intervention.

This is also true of all current land based routes at the digital carrier level.
It's very rare when there is a complete isolation. I have only seen one or two in my career, one being a couple of my sites in NY on 9/11 and one where a major network element completely lost clock. but even this can be fixed fairly quick via redundancy provided in a mutual fashion among groups of carriers. We all have cables coming in from everywhere, a lot of which are "dark" or with no traffic on them for this purpose so it's fairly easy in the case of a total failure on a ring to manually reroute this traffic onto other cables.

Another fact is that having the ability to know exactly where our cables are cut in the form of optical time-delay reflectometry among other things gives plenty of time to find the culprit in the area. So it would be known what caused it and there would be statements other than ships dragging anchors as these cables over time tend to bury themselves rather well in the bottom for the most part.

I think we will find there are more than the number the press is releasing that are cut and this is really strange since these cables are some pretty well-armored stuff and well out of the way.

here's some decent info below....although not entirely accurate....there is a lot more than that. The map doesn't seem to zoom well, but it gives a very general idea of what you're dealing with.

www.telegeography.com...

www.news.com...

www.iscpc.org...

Also take into consideration that these undersea cables also have shared redundancy with terrestrial networks in a lot of cases not depicted on these maps.

There would have to be a lot cut to isolate multiple countries and slow traffic elsewhere, and even so, service would be restored shortly thereafter.

Based on this, I have no choice but to call poo poo on ships dragging anchors resulting in a complete network isolation. No way, unless it was deliberate.


Just my two.

Critical_Mass, or anyone else for that matter,

I'm not too knowledgeable about this, but if my understanding is correct, the NSA, and presumably the alphabet agencies of a handful of other countries, do have the ability to cut and tap fiber optic undersea cables but that it would almost positively necessitate a service disruption on the cable.

Is it possible that the cables were intentionally cut, by ship anchors or other means, in order to allow a government agency to place tapping devices on the line while traffic on them was down?

Maybe I've been reading to many non-fiction spec-ops books lately, but I can just imagine a SEAL team locking out of a nuclear sub for a mission like this.

-Cypher

reply to post by Cypher


I've been thinking about that possibility too since the timing of the following news (US drafting plan to allow government access to any email or Web search) coincided shortly with spotty internet connection which is still happening even now (I'm from Asia).

Good links, Critical.

My what a big anchor that is! Or is it wire cutters?
Tap?

Oh, BTW it is possible for submarines to snag fishing boats with cable antenna. Things can happen.

reply to post by Cypher


My understanding is that the USS Jimmy Carter has the ability to tap the fiber cables without causing a huge disturbance.

reply to post by resistor


this is a possibility no-one has thought of yet... but would 'they' really dare to orchestrate another 9/11 type event during Super Bowl XLII? even in Glendale, AZ? wouldn't that be to obvious at all? O_o i really wonder if Tom Brady is going to explode due to an IED in the football... NO that just CAN'T be...

[edit on 2-2-2008 by EBE154]