11–20 of 103 posts
I get sabotage. But why international sabotage?
Not saying it’s that, but everyone jumping to “Putin activated his sleeper cell in Germany to … delay trains THREE hours” seems kind of silly. Unless a 3 hour delay in Germany is like a seven day shut down elsewhere.
Just cut, not stolen? Has Germany been spared from overhead line theft? It's been a regular thing in Sweden for a decade or so. https://www.thelocal.se/20120404/40090/ https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-08-11-copper-thefts-c... They're also now stealing copper sheets from graveyard buildings and church doors, plus grave adornments.
Maybe I am tinfoiling too hard... In February this year there was an attack against Vodafone Portugal that brought down their whole mobile networks, 4G, 5G, and fiber, taking them several days to bring everything back up [0]. It also very clearly was a state actor, no threats, no ransom, sophisticated. Taking down pipelines, taking down comms, taking down transport infrastructure. All within a few months. Always on N…
Just cut, not stolen? Has Germany been spared from overhead line theft? It's been a regular thing in Sweden for a decade or so. https://www.thelocal.se/20120404/40090/ https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-08-11-copper-thefts-c... They're also now stealing copper sheets from graveyard buildings and church doors, plus grave adornments.
I get sabotage. But why international sabotage?
We’ve had cases of workers intentionally sabotaging a system to get a day off. Not saying it’s that, but everyone jumping to “Putin activated his sleeper cell in Germany to … delay trains THREE hours” seems kind of silly. Unless a 3 hour delay in Germany is like a seven day shut down elsewhere.
Maybe I am tinfoiling too hard... In February this year there was an attack against Vodafone Portugal that brought down their whole mobile networks, 4G, 5G, and fiber, taking them several days to bring everything back up [0]. It also very clearly was a state actor, no threats, no ransom, sophisticated. Taking down pipelines, taking down comms, taking down transport infrastructure. All within a few months. Always on N…
> always sophisticated enough that it would require knowledgeable state actors.
Maybe I’m missing something, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here?
This was reported to be caused by severed cables in two different places. And I read some speculation/claims that this cut the primary and the backup systems simultaneously, which would explain why this lead to a complete outage in a system that should have quite some redundancy. Of course we don't really have enough reliable information right now, but it looks a bit like this would require quite a bit of detailed in…
If they were cut simultaneously or close enough AND they weren’t routed together (I’ve seen cases where the main fiber and backup fiber were in the same trench for a distance, backhoe magnet) then it’s pretty good guess it’s intentional sabotage. However if one line had been cut at some point earlier and they were ON the backup line when that got cut, it could be sabots or it could just be generic construction mistak…
The two cities are around 500km / 300mi apart.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/deutsche-bahn-derzeit-kein-f...
Maybe I am tinfoiling too hard... In February this year there was an attack against Vodafone Portugal that brought down their whole mobile networks, 4G, 5G, and fiber, taking them several days to bring everything back up [0]. It also very clearly was a state actor, no threats, no ransom, sophisticated. Taking down pipelines, taking down comms, taking down transport infrastructure. All within a few months. Always on N…
Also I wonder if it was a physical oder purely software attack? If it was a physical attack on a critical system, it could have been anybody, not just state actors.