A story by Wired details how a single backhoe accidentally crippled Sprint’s entire network west of the Rockies.
A study issued last month by the Common Ground Alliance, or CGA — an industry group comprised of utilities and construction companies — calculated that there were more than 675,000 excavation accidents in 2004 in which underground cables or pipelines were damaged. And an October report from the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions found that cable dig-ups were the single most common cause of telecom outages over a 12-year period ending in 2004, with the number of incidents dropping in recent years but the severity and duration of the outages increasing.
In 2004, Department of Homeland Security officials became fearful that terrorists might start using accidental dig-ups as a road map for deliberate attacks, and convinced the FCC to begin locking up previously public data on outages. In a commission filing, DHS argued successfully that revealing the details of “even a single event may present a grave risk to the infrastructure.”
“We see people talking about the digital Pearl Harbor from the worms and Trojans and viruses,” says Howard Schmidt, former White House cybersecurity adviser. “But in all probability, there’s more likelihood of what we call the ‘backhoe attack’ that would have more impact on a region then a Code Red, or anything we’ve seen so far.”
Source: Wired
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