Who could possibly do something like this? A competitor that doesn’t want to play fair? Or maybe a disgruntled employee? Some of many questions that must be flowing through the minds of FBI field agents as they investigate attacks on fiber installations throughout Northern California.
This has actually been occurring since July of last year, where an attacker(s) has been cutting fiber optic cables through the northern state, causing outages or significant speed decreases for nearby paying customers.
The FBI stepped into the situation to better investigate the situation and find out who has been doing all this damage. Affecting areas such as San Francisco and as of recently, Sacramento.
The FBI said that the attackers are equipped with specialized tools normally carried by technicians who typically perform maintenance on such lines. Typically that quickly points to the competition or staff, but since you can buy just about anything online these days, the FBI is going to have their hands full with this one. The hardest part in all of this is that the attackers have picked rural/remote areas where there is no surveillance, making the job easy to pull off.
Until the FBI or the companies who own the lines (Zayo and Level 3) release comments on the situation, there is no way to tell who they are leaning towards when it comes to a culprit. Most services do have backup solutions that help prevent a total outage, but a severe decrease in speed can still do a lot of damage to companies that rely on their connection.
You do have to wonder why on Earth anyone would want to cause damage to something that has the ability to help push us down the path of technological evolution more quickly. Especially now that there has been a recent break in bandwidth restrictions via fiber. Maybe it’s an older activist trying to show the world that we don’t need glass and wires to communicate with each other, by showing everyone what it used to be like before we had any of this technology. Regardless, now that the FBI is involved, you can bet that the offenders are looking at a harsh penalty once they are caught.
