French internet cables cut in act of sabotage that caused outages across country
- Reference: 1722264312
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/07/29/french_fiber_cables_cut/
- Source link:
The attacks on French internet infrastructure were committed Sunday night, according to Secretary of State for Digital Affairs Marina Ferrari, who on X [1]said the cable sabotage only had "localized consequences" for internet, landlines, and mobile networks.
Major French telecom firms Bouygues, SFR, and Free were all affected by the attacks, which apparently could have only been carried out by an "axe or grinder," according to an SFR spokesperson in a statement to [2]Le Monde . SFR didn't specify what parts of its cable network were hit, merely [3]saying it was vandalized in "several departments."
[4]
Free, however, [5]stated on X that its cables were affected in six different departments, two of which are in the north and the other four in the south along the Mediterranean coast. As of the time of writing, the company says it has made progress on restoring service in four departments and is working on fixing cables in the other two.
[6]Russia's cyber spies still threatening French national security, democracy
[7]French issue alerte rouge after local governments knocked offline by cyber attack
[8]French government sites disrupted by très grande DDoS
Internet outage statistics from Zone ADSL&Fibre [9]indicate that problems started cropping up in the early hours of the morning – around 02:00 local time – and have primarily affected Free's network, with SFR and Bouygues users reporting fewer problems. The outages are seemingly still not fully resolved as reports remain elevated compared to yesterday around the same time.
It might not be a coincidence that on Friday, France's national rail network SNCF experienced arson attacks that specifically targeted cables transmitting safety information for train operators. French police have already arrested a suspect who cops described as an "ultraleft" activist, according to [10]CBS News . It's unclear if the railway and internet attacks are related, and if they were committed to disrupt the Paris Olympics.
[11]
The Register asked Bouygues and Free to comment. ®
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[1] https://x.com/Marina_Ferrari/status/1817839721931829550
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2024/07/29/fiber-optic-networks-sabotaged-in-parts-of-france_6703674_7.html
[3] https://x.com/SFR/status/1817865071059485075
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Zqe8ozI2iAbwveYSskz8mQAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://x.com/Free_1337/status/1817893178785063181
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/20/russias_cyber_attacks_france_report/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/12/french_municipalities_cyberattack/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/france_ddos/
[9] https://www.zoneadsl.com/reseau/pannes
[10] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-olympics-trains-sabotage-arrest-far-left-activist-phone-lines-telecommunications/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zqe8ozI2iAbwveYSskz8mQAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Resistant to breaks
The routing around failure option works only until you get to the last exchange point for your connection...
F.T.A.
"As of the time of writing, the company says it has made progress on restoring service in four departments and is working on fixing cables in the other two"
Seems to me to be long winded way of saying "we've fixed fuck all at the moment"
Re: F.T.A.
In the UK it's Openreach speak for "We've identified and put a paint mark on the bit of pavement where the hole is going to be dug ..."
Re: F.T.A.
“…but we’re waiting for the council to resurface the road all nice and fresh and smooth before we dig our hole & crudely patch it to the industry-standard 0.5” below the rest of the surface.”
Transport technologies
It's worth pointing out that a fiber is only the physical layer. It could be carrying any one of a number of upper-layer protocols (Ethernet-based, ATM or SDH/SONET etc) and not just limited to 'internet' traffic, which may account for the different level of impact on the end-users.
Fiber breaks are not uncommon on land for various reasons (Usually ground-works involving a digger and/or insufficient mapping and human error), and thankfully less common on high-capacity undersea cables. For a while, the most common cause (here in the UK, anyway) was thieves thinking the 'cable' they were stealing contained copper that could be weighed-in/sold for scrap..
I've got some experience in designing-in redundancy within SDH/SONET (Think MSP/MSPRING/SNCP) to consciously plan for the inevitable fiber faults during network build-out, and I guess other technology-specific protection mechanisms are available [1] for the different layers. It helps if you think about this sort of thing ahead of construction [2] .
Who knows what (if any) transmission-protecting mechanisms were in use on the severed cables in France....some people will pay for it up-front, and some won't :-)
[1] Anyone know how you protect the individual wavelengths in a DWDM system? If you do, please give me a hint!
[2] The usual 'gotcha' here is that you take the trouble to route physical links over geographically diverse/difference routes in the infrastructure you control, only to find later that all of the protected paths end up in a single building/power zone/underground ducting etc. courtesy of someone more cost-conscious or less diligent than you!
Resistant to breaks
The original internet was designed to be resistant to breaks in the network, with traffic re-routed around them. But who knows what the modern accountants have imposed on us?