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Comment by EricE | Hacker News Reader

Turning off stuff like this is beyond stupid. Satellites are pretty freaking fragile. China has tested destroying them and has done so with their own pretty easily. A high altitude nuke would be pretty devastating too, and you don't need the nuke to survive re-entry to be effective (hello North Korea, Iran and others or government probably doesn't want to acknowledge as easily capable of such an attack).

We pile all our eggs into single, fragile technological baskets at our peril. Dumbasses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbs7uLUPZ8

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Are moving satellites in space easier to take out than a stationary antenna in Colorado?

Regarding collateral damage and/or political fallout? Yeah, probably.

Probably. Colorado has defenses. A large-scale ICBM attack would get through, but bombers or a small ICBM attack wouldn’t.

There is no point in an ICBM attack nowadays if it is not large scale, so if it happens you can count on 99% chance that your defenses will not be effective.

And in the event of a large-scale ICBM attack, keeping accurate time will be the least of your troubles.

Yes. I was going to make that point as well, but I guess the previous comment was kind of hyperbolic.

Huh? I just did the first step of any intelligence gathering, and looked it up on Google maps. It's an unguarded dirt road off of an FM country-style 2 lane road. It's not even blurred out, for you know, security reasons. You could practically drive right up to the transmitter/antenna, and take it out with what ever crude/rudimentary method you chose including just driving your truck into it. You could probably buy a couple of local yocals enough beer/whiskey to convince them it would be a fun thing to use the building for target practice. It's a super soft target. By the time anyone could figure out that the transmitter was offline, and then decide to actually send a crew out to investigate, the attackers could already be on a plane to wherever. ICBM attacks are something that is closely watched with early-warning satellites, and have automatic response procedures.

That sort of attack would result in minor damage and it would be quickly fixed. To permanently destroy the transmitter would require blowing it up, and NORAD will make that difficult.

I think you have too much faith in NORAD. Shoot, do it on Christmas, they're too busy tracking Santa.

NORAD isn't going to notice a truck loaded with explosives doing the speed limit on a road that is perfectly legal for it to be on. You're over complicating the level of attack required. Think guerilla style. I've been to TV/Radio antenna farms. They are not reinforced anything. There's a pad lock on a chain securing a chain link fence gate. They are sheet metal structures around the equipment for the sole purpose of keeping the equipment out of the elements. Even if you don't take out the transmitter, taking out the antenna would also suffice. The antenna structures are super vulnerable. If a 1500' tower collapses, it takes a bit of time to get it back up once the parts&pieces have been gathered and assembled at the site. Here's a list of how non-intended accidents involving antenna structures[0], so imagine someone that intends to do harm. At this point, I'm concerned what my Google search history might lead one to suspect. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_catastrophic_collapses...

If there were local agents with a truck of explosives, there would be way, way more valuable targets to attack though.

That depends entirely on the plot of the movie. If it’s a terrorist thing, then yeah it’s probably going to be a shopping mall, sporting event or similar. If it’s an opening salvo to take out “key” infrastructure clearing the way for a larger something later, then it’s perfect.

WWV "server" for the service could be rapidly restored from any site in the same general area. There are almost certainly spares for all the equipment, and most of it isn't even specific to the application. What matters is the protocol and widely deployed receive stations (which would be very hard to change).

Killing zero people versus killing x {x>1} is a very different calculus for an attacker.

Does it matter? The attack vectors are orthogonal, requiring a linear increase of resources. For something like a clock sync source, it might not be worth it for the attacker.

The antenna in Colorado is considerably easier to replace.

NTP ?

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