There have been nearly a dozen physical attacks on California Bay Area residents’ internet connections in the past year, prompting an FBI investigation.
The latest attack Tuesday knocked out internet service for Sacramento businesses and residents by breaking into an underground network protector and snipping fiber-optic cables. The FBI hasn’t provided details on the extent of the outages targeting two internet providers, Level 3 Communications, Zayo Group, and subsidiary client Wave Broadband, but evidence suggests similar attacks have been happening since July 6, 2014.
The FBI asked the public in June for information regarding suspicious behavior before the internet outages, indicating the Web saboteurs were dressed as telecommunications maintenance professionals.
“When some of the first cuts were taking place, the cuts and cables were fixed, and there was no evidence, no anything to look at,” FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich told the Wall Street Journal. “We just need to have a little bit more time to have our people go in.”
Repairs are being made to restore service in the Sacramento area but the motive behind the attacks unknown and raises concerns of power grid security.
“When it’s situations that are scattered all in one geography, that raises the possibility that they are testing out capabilities, response times and impact,” Jonathan Thompson, cybersecurity expert and CEO of Rock Security in Indianapolis told USA Today. “That is a security person’s nightmare.”
With new data breaches happening at an exponential rate and scale, traditional hacks into companies and government servers is at the forefront of the nation’s cybersecurity worries, but power grid attacks happen with just as much frequency. The Energy Department received 362 reports of physical or cyberattacks that led to power outages from 2011 through 2014. The Department of Homeland Security logged almost four times as many cyberattacks on energy sources, jumping from 31 reports in 2011 to 151 in 2013.
“Whether it’s 13, dozens, thousands — it’s been more art than science to identify what an attack is,” Edison Electric Institute’s national security director Scott Aaronson told USA Today. “There are probes that happen all the time. Adversaries are essentially looking for weaknesses in a network. I’ve heard people say millions (of attacks occur) a day.”