German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage
dw.com
dw.com
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 NATO targets, always localized, never claimed with any statements, always sophisticated enough that it would require knowledgeable state actors.
It all seems like a training ground to find out if they can do it and probably a message to NATO members to not assume they are safe.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/vodaf...
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 been anybody, not just state actors.
I think this is about sending a message (we're aware of that situation + able and willing to take advantage of it) and to do it in a way that can't be kept under wraps. I guess this won't make it any easier for Chancellor Scholz to send the tanks Ukraine requested.
To chime in on this, if you're in Germany and report a security vulnerability to a vendor there's a very good chance you'll get a criminal investigation, house searched, computers/phones seized for a long time etc. in return. Often in combination with a cease and desist or civil charges.
It's not a good idea to approach vendors directly with findings in general, but in Germany doing that can seriously screw your life up.
I wouldn't do security research in Germany at all. If you have talents in the area, just go to the US.
I believe most simply go to another EU country since that's extremely easy to do and you can still serve the German market easily.
Honestly, there is the opposite of a strong security mindset over here. Just a year ago, a security expert found an app of a major party leaking data of thousands of private persons - it was basically a web application without authorization. She tried to disclose this responsibly and naturally got sued due to unauthorized access to computer systems. Lilith Wittman is the person if you want to look further into it.
That's the standard here for security topics.
And if you keep digging into prosecution of cyber criminality, or at least actions of the state to increase cyber security, or at least actions to increase competency in cyber topics, it just gets worse. For example, they are looking for cyber security experts to join the police and state departments, but because they'd be working in various kinds of police jobs... they have to go through the same fitness and endurance tests as all police officers. Casual things like 12 minute runs, obstacle courses under pressure. Things IT-Nerds are good at.
I might have been interested some time ago, but currently that's just a recipe for criminal charges and disappointment.
I might be able to do that, but then again the pay isn't great either. You can't ask for the right candidate with some useless extra requirements, if you don't even pay enough to get the right candidate without these extras.
(German) https://youtu.be/dtZf-A4Qd5k
In some sense, they are doing pretty good. Much of German's companies and government organizations rely heavily on paper, telephone calls, tape recorders, physical meetings, and even fax. Many bridges (big, but also in rural areas) even have signs containing the max weight limits for various vehicle types including tanks. I sometimes wonder whether Germany's reliance on old-fashion methods are actually meant to be as reliable as possible in worst-case scenarios and to be difficult to hack. I mean, good luck hacking a tape recorder from thousands of miles away.
That's a bold assumption
The locations are a few hundred kilometers apart.
Considering it was two cables I wonder if they were part of the same fibre ring. Usually with those if the cable gets cut the traffic can route the other way around the loop. This is why they use rings instead of simple links.
It's because fibre cables are easy to cut by mistake, a digging machine will cut through it without knowing. Unlike the old backbone cables of old that were thick as a sewer pipe and carried thousands of cable pairs and heavy armour.
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.
Somehow I think the shooting war in Europe right now is doing that just fine without the need for tinfoil.
If there's anything that does not need to be further incentivized among European populations and governments right now, it's NATO coordination.
On the other hand, as I understand it, the other side some years ago expressed concerns about encouragement on their borders*. In fact, I've heard it said there was an agreement that wouldn't happen...then it did. But that depth is lost? How convenient.
Once you accept (?) the lies about the WMDs then it becomes clear that there are actors that have no bounds. Believe what you must, but chance are good it's based on one side of the story (as it so often is).
* Very similar to UBL saying get out of our neighborhood, or else. But we don't want to talk about that as it dilutes the strength of the propaganda.
History, especially recent history*, is clear...don't underestimate the nefarious, especially when their reputations aren't properly understood. Especially when they're so adept at controlling the narrative of their story.
* For example, just last week there was this:
https://lawstreetmedia.com/news/citing-new-evidence-survivin...
To continue to label the established MO of these outfits as "conspiracy theory" is lazy and out of touch with reality.
"It must be true because it seems to be false" is a giant red flag for conspiracy rhetoric, FWIW.
Again, I'm not interested in engaging on the subject. I'm explaining why regular people looking at real wars don't see things your way.
I'm explaining the same thing, the difference is my interpretation is based on actual historic events. That is, ultimately, what regular people believe isn't an accident.
> always sophisticated enough that it would require knowledgeable state actors.
Maybe I’m missing something, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here?
Its not like they even try to hide their location or anything.
If I was to put my tinfoil hat on I would say those current attacks concentrate on Germany because due to long standing influence of Russians on German politics German's political class is a de-facto ally of Russia (against the will of its own population). Those attack's purpose is to scare ordinary Germans into letting their politicians continue pretend they help while they continue doing all in their power to help Putin's regime(or its equivalent under a different name).
As it's usually the case with these events, it's easy to find motives if you discount the possibility of being caught. The US might do it for the reasons I mentioned. The German govt might do it to make the population more willing to follow orders. Some anti-capitalist group might do it because ... idk, trains are evil (they've been sabotaging mostly local trains in/around Berlin in the past decade or so, but they typically claim their actions, so we'll see). The DB might be behind it to get more money to upgrade & secure their infrastructure.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't me, but everyone else has a motive.
You don't buy what? Why does there have to be "ideological friendship" for two groups of criminals to cooperate and root for each other? It has been obvious to anyone looking at actual actions made rather than words and political theater.
I'm sure that's true in general, and you'll never know whether you did someone else's bidding without realizing it, unless they tell you (but would you believe them?) or you uncover some huge conspiracy (but then who says that's not fake to make you do something else?). I vaguely remember an interview that Adam Curtis made with some British economist for one of his movies concerning stagflation and the general direction of the economy and wages at that time, and he said something like "when I can't sleep, I sometimes wonder whether what we did was exactly what someone wanted and they knew what would happen".
As for Die Linke, (the far-left wing of the) SPD and the Greens, I don't believe they're malicious. I believe they mean well, even though I probably disagree with them on most of their core issues.
Of course we don't really have enough reliable information right now, but it looks a bit like this would require quite a bit of detailed internal knowledge to know which two cables you need to cut to shut this down entirely. Which would suggest more sophisticated actors might be responsible for this.
However if one line had been cut at some point earlier and they were ON the backup line when that got cut, it could be sabots or it could just be generic construction mistakes/idiocy.
The two cities are around 500km / 300mi apart.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/deutsche-bahn-derzeit-kein-f...
Has Germany been spared from overhead line theft? It's been a regular thing in Sweden for a decade or so.
https://www.thelocal.se/20120404/40090/
https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-08-11-copper-thefts-c...
They're also now stealing copper sheets from graveyard buildings and church doors, plus grave adornments.
Stuff like that happens every few years on larger scale and sometimes multiple times a year on smaller scale (e.g. part of Berlin local trains not going because of it).
A lot of this sabotage comes from people trying to steal cables, but then also sometimes giving up in the process.
Then there a climate crazed people which in a twisted way blame the trains for partially causing the climate crisis because they are too expensive...
There are also two or three other radicalized movements which in twisted and less twisted ways use the DB as a representative for the "evil state/system" and then jump from there to sabotaging the train service, not limited to the DB (sounds stupid? it is, but happens anyway).
The only thing special in this case is how many lines had been affected, not that it happened.
Getting illegal short term access to the cables around there long runs isn't hard. Like at all.
Finding which cable need to be cut is a bit harder but not too hard either. (It's not a state secret or anything, there are quite a bunch of people which know stuff like that. Worse just by following news in recent years about what interruptions cable theft caused is probably enough to find out where you need to cut cables.) Sure it involves a bit of planing and research etc. But nothing which is beyond what a small handful of misguided but not very stupid people can archive. And in my experience people in the group I mentioned are not stupid at all, misguided sure, but not stupid.
Lookup letzte generation.
There are probably others, I’m not really following it too close.
You obviously have an agenda. None of these groups blame "trains".
also the reason I use "climate crazed" instead of idk. climate activists is because I do not mean climate activists. I also _do not_ mean climate activists which use more extreme measurements and are sometimes portrayed as crazy by the media.
But there are people which have gone beyond any form of logical reasoning in all kinds of movements. This including climate related movements but also pretty much any other bigger movement asking for a lot of change. And there had already been cases of people attacking German train infrastructure "because trains are to expensive and as such partially at fault of climate change". And just because this people are beyond reasoning wrt. their ideological believes doesn't mean they are stupid or incompetent.
Through it wasn't the bast choice of an example. Thinking about it it was a very terrible choice for an example.
EDIT: Also using crazed was a bad word choice, too.
Exaggerating much, aren't we?
There was a similar (co-)incident a few years ago.
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.
Compared to some other countries it is extremely reliable.
Local train service reliability differs quite a bit depending on region and sometimes in region which exact train you take.
And perception of reliability can differ from reality, e.g. Berlin people always complain about how unreliable their public transportation is, but due to high frequency of the transportation and a tight nitted 3-4 layer transportation net it is in effect really not that bad. Sure there are a few places where you e.g. reliable miss a follow up connection. But you can calculate that in and with delay times included it is still better then what you find in many other places in the word. So uh, perception is it's a catastrophe, but practice is it's far behind Tokio but not that bad at all in general (for most connections).
Partially joking, I think the image stems from the past, but the system degrades when it's not maintained appropriately.
There was an entertaining talk at a CCC event a few years back which looked at DB reliability and accuracy (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rb9CfOvojk
For this talk, there's an en dub (seems to not dub the introduction from the host, just the actual talk); have a link: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...
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.
What an expression of infantility. What will happen next?
Germany-wide internet blackout because someone accidentally pulled the power cable from the router?
The point is - how can such a neuralgic facility not be secured? Deutsche Bahn is part of the critical infrastructure - and no one has carried out a vulnerability analysis? No one has thought about how this critical infrastructure can be attacked?
According to the newspaper WELT AM SONNTAG, a team of forensic experts is now at work. So it must be a place that can be entered, manipulated and left without being secured and without causing a stir?
Every $5 VPS server is obviously better secured than this facility.
And I still say: this is unparalleled infantility.
Your seem to think this a problem of uncontrolled physical access, when it is about redundancy and why cutting so few cables can create a service outage in large parts of north-western germany. Did you know that, by cutting just a few cables, overland lines that are easily accessible, large parts of the USA would have electricity blackouts? That we would need cameras and fences and motion detectors and security checkpoints along thousands of kilometers of cables to secure physical access? Even if we bury them instead of running them overland? As if digging is hard. The problem is not about access to some facility, it is about a lack of redundancy in what should be a network.