News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Not easily.
They’re deep enough down that getting to them requires some creativity (ROVs, specially trained deep sea divers, etc.)
Then, how do you sever the connection with the operator not seeing the break? Just installing the snooper is going to take time. A sudden loss of all signal and then that signal coming back? Yeah they’ll notice.
Then how do they get the data back? Either they have to run their own cable out (expensive and obvious,) or they use the cable itself and double the data going through…( also obvious. )
Further, everyone and their grandma uses encryption for basically everything. Anything actually interesting is going to be heavily encrypted. (This is also why they’d double the data through put. The snooper won’t have the power to break the encryption,)
FWIW, optical cables have electronic repeaters spaced regularly along their length, so it may not be necessary to interrupt the connection to put a tap on it.
Even if data is encrypted, the source and destination addresses may be in the clear. If that's the case, it is still valuable for traffic analysis. Similarly, it's possible that an attacker has the means to decrypt traffic (they have the keys, or an exploit in the implementation).
As to getting the data back, you're right that an attacker probably wouldn't want to duplicate the entire flow of traffic, but they may wish to copy all data to/from certain addresses.
True, but gaining physical access to the repeater is going to still be difficult, and I would be shocked if there’s not some type of switch that triggers an alarm when it’s accessed. It would also be extremely difficult to upload fresh firmware to it in place- at least, or without removing it to a dry environment.
(Maintenance would just upload it through the data connection.)
It would be easier (and probably actually profitable…) to gain access to it during manufacture. This was the legitimate concerns about 5g infrastructure being made in china.
Regardless, it’s almost certainly more cost effective to get hooks into the IT guy maintaining the system than any physical attack.
Even if there are tamper sensors (unlikely, for something on the seabed built by cheapskate telcos), you could very likely trip it or just take it offline, and they'd attribute it to normal wear and tear from the ocean and its denizens.
Also, you can tap fiber optic lines by bending them, no cuts required. This seems unlikely for undersea cables, considering the size and weight and thickness of sheathing, but isn't impossible.
They can actually just store the data on drives on the snooping device, and then periodically swap out the storage devices with a submarine.
Feels like setup for a movie.
Call it Geek Squad
Periodically like every minute?
These cables can carry terabits per second. I suppose if you had 100 petabytes of storage (that could probably be achieved with a single large rack of machines) you could just swap the entire rig every few hours or so, but that feels extremely cumbersome.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
You can just store metadata instead of all traffic (most of it is encrypted anyway). Or just store the packets that interest you.