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German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage

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Re: German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage

#21

Post by gberger »

captainmuon wrote: post #19
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #4

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…

Yeah but I would assume the same attack is not going to be successfully against the same target a second time. So they are essentially providing free pentesting. And creating a climate that allows governments to introduce much stronger security measures. Without creating much actual damage. 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…

> Yeah but I would assume the same attack is not going to be successfully against the same target a second time.

That's a bold assumption

Re: German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage

#24

Post by hendrikrassmann »

captainmuon wrote: post #19
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #4

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…

Yeah but I would assume the same attack is not going to be successfully against the same target a second time. So they are essentially providing free pentesting. And creating a climate that allows governments to introduce much stronger security measures. Without creating much actual damage. 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…

There are reports that a cable was severed. (https://twitter.com/gebauerspon/status/1578706469570351104) But it's just a tweet. Don't know for sure.

Re: German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage

#25

Post by jaza »

tastroder wrote: post #15
bombcar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not, especially on the weekend. The freight delays might be somewhat of an issue over the next few days but on the passenger side it's a mild inconvenience at best. It disrupted the rail network country-wide to some degree but the public rail infrastructure in Germany isn't really known for it's reliability anyway.

German rail not known for its reliability... really?! Perhaps not in Germany. But in most other countries, German rail is perceived to be very reliable. And compared to rail in most other countries, German rail is very reliable!

Re: German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage

#26

Post by microjim »

gberger wrote: post #21
captainmuon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but I would assume the same attack is not going to be successfully against the same target a second time. So they are essentially providing free pentesting. And creating a climate that allows governments to introduce much stronger security measures. Without creating much actual damage. 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…

> Yeah but I would assume the same attack is not going to be successfully against the same target a second time. That's a bold assumption

Chaos engineering... for public infrastructure? :)

Re: German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage

#29

Post by chiefalchemist »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #4

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…

How is this tinfoiling?

The tinfoiler would think it's an inside (NATO) job. That these things are being done to maintain the fear, to increase the military budgets (i.e., money that could be spent on social programs), to increase the us v them unity, etc. Like 1984?

But perhaps The MIC qualifies as a state actor? As it's said...follow the money.

There are so many entities that benefit from such things it's difficult to say. Was it X? Was it Y making it look like X? Unless there's indisputable evidence then it's always hard to say. Easy to assume. But hard to say.

Re: German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage

#30

Post by kotaKat »

Why do I feel like the 'sabotage' was small woodland creatures and coincidences?

We just had a major outage in prod at our ISP last month because squirrels and rats took out nearly 800 feet of fiber, requiring a full replacement of the section in lieu of splicing individual strands back together.

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