![]() ![]() In France-and more widely around the world-there’s been an increase in attacks against telecom towers in recent years, including cutting cables, setting fire to cell phone towers, and attacking engineers. Instead, in many potential sabotage instances he has seen, those who attack telecom infrastructure aim to target cell phone towers where damage is obvious and claim responsibility for their actions. However, multiple experts speaking to WIRED were skeptical of the suggestion. In June, CyberScoop reported claims that “radical ecologists” who oppose digitalization may be behind the attacks. Neither the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office nor Anssi, the French cybersecurity agency, responded to WIRED’s requests for comment. No groups or individuals have claimed responsibility for the damage, and French police have not announced any arrests linked to the cuts. Teams working at Netalis restored connections so most customers experienced a “limited impact,” he says, adding repairs that lasted “several dozen hours” started around 10 hours after the initial incident took place.Īt present, there’s little information about who may have been behind the attacks. ![]() “We had three very difficult hours because a backup link was not active,” Netalis’s Guillaume says. In many instances, internet traffic was manually or automatically rerouted through other cables. Cables are one way connections are made, but the future skeleton of the internet could be built of satellites.Lumen, Zayo, and DE-CIX all say that their services weren’t down or impacted for long and have all been repaired. “I see this paper as part of a broader push to have more transparency around Internet policy issues that can inform a broader debate.” “A lot of discussions in Washington take place in a vacuum of empirical data,” says Tim Maurer, head of research at the Cyber Security Initiative of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the New America Foundation. And it may not be the most visually compelling, but its makers hope that this map of "the internet’s backbone" could help the infrastructure stay strong and secure. Other efforts include visualizing the connections between websites or the grouping of IP addresses. It’s not the only way to map the internet. The major cables that support the internet, with their connections in red and red boxes where those cables connect. All in all, the picture is one of dark lines snaking across the U.S. The data in this map is drawn from public records created during the permitting process for laying cables that document the location for such cables. Of course, other maps might be out there, just not public. “I think the map highlights that there are probably many opportunities to make the network more robust.” “Our intention is to help improve security by improving knowledge,” Barford tells Simonite. ![]() This time, however, the Department of Homeland Security has made the map and the data behind it available to the public through the project called Predict. Mapping the internet’s infrastructure has been thought of as a security risk - which is why some previous attempts have been illegal. The exact routes of those cables, which belong to major telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Level 3, have not been previously publicly viewable, despite the fact that they are effectively critical public infrastructure, says Barford. The map shows the paths taken by the long-distance fiber-optic cables that carry Internet data across the continental U.S. internet.įor MIT Technology Review, Tom Simonite writes that computer scientist Paul Barford and his colleagues took four years to produce the map. Computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin just released the first public map of the infrastructure that supports the heart of the U.S. Yet it is possible to map almost anything, including the internet. Although the internet is now a ubiquitous part of many people’s lives, it still can be tricky to think about as a whole, especially for those seeking to visualize it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |