There were four sabotage teams. One team, on the line to Marseilles, was surprised by rail maintenance workers and ran away, but left some equipment, and possibly vehicles, behind.[1]
It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system. Something similar happened in Germany 2 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...). I assume that it's a kind of warning by Russia or some other country. They don't even need weapons to attack countries that rely on public transport. If they'd systematically attack the railway system for a longer time, they could probably disable it for many months or even years.
We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
I don't think it's this simple: someone could do significant damage to the US's economy by sabotaging a small number of bridges that transit or cross I-95. Meanwhile, Ukraine appears to be operating military railways with relative success, given that it's currently engaged in the largest European land war in 80 years.
And let's not forget the premise is all wrong as well.
It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system
The attack on SNCF was not "easy". This was a methodical, large scale, coordinated attack. They knew what to take down. How to take it down with least collateral damage. And when each should be taken down. (Order likely counts here. You're trying to plug up tracks.) Point being, these attacks are not "easy". In a place with as much unrest and discontent as France has bubbling beneath the surface, the trains would go down twice weekly, every week, if it was "easy" to do so.
A similar methodical, large scale, coordinated attack on our bridges would shut the system down as well. I won't even mention some other infrastructural assets that, if targeted, easily will shut us down for months because I think they are just that soft as targets. I honestly believe it would be irresponsible to even put the idea out into the ether.
The takeaway here is that if you're dealing with large organizations, with even a modest amount of resources, and a grievance, you're likely dealing with orgs that have a lot of young people they can send to successfully carry out such attacks. Thankfully, these attacks still require a level of technical knowledge that seems to elude such groups. So it's just matter of keeping that information as secure as possible on the one hand. While working towards security and resilience of those assets on the other.
You could bring the entirely of NYC to a standstill by simply abandoning a large bus or truck in a single artery of manhattan or one of the bridges. Literally just drive into a tunnel, then get out and walk off. The amount of chaos this would cause would take ages to get any towing services in to clear it.
If you ever want to turn your hair grey prematurely consider an attacker that infiltrates Tesla's Full Self Driving development and adds a "crash into the nearest X at maximum acceleration" hidden subroutine that can be triggered via an over-the-air signal. Millions of Teslas suddenly deciding to point at the nearest power pole or transformer and flooring the accelerator in the hopes of crashing hard enough to start a battery fire.
A mere decade ago this was pure science fiction, but over the past few years it has become a possibility.
This has been a concern for well over a decade, and self driving cars only changes it a little bit. You can google "remote car hacking 2010" or earlier to find great examples and reports of this going back pretty far. It's been awhile since this was science fiction.
Basically every modern car can have software that says "slam the gas pedal as far as possible". Combine that with cars that are heavily integrated into their infotainment system or even include built in wifi and you've got the "over the air signal" covered.
The attacker just needs to make appropriate modifications to some open source library or framework that Tesla FSD software uses. Of course, these modifications would be made by people who have been contributing to the project for many years and have built up impeccable reputations for writing safe, reliable and secure code.
We have no way of knowing whether sun h an implant already exists, wait inf to be turned on at the moment of maximum damage. Luckily I have no hair to turn gray.
Having a railroad functional enough for military purposes is easy enough: get the rails hooked up. Put soldiers at switches to flip them, use radio for coordination. For high speed high frequency passenger travel it's more complicated: you need automation flipping switches at the right times, automatic block signaling to ensure that trains are where they're supposed to be and won't crash into each other, etc.
That's why they were able to get some of the trains back to operation: they can't run them as close together as before, but can still use the tracks.
This is a bit ironic given the fact that Russia makes a conscious choice to rely on railways for military logistics. Why? Because they are more resilient and easier to repair than roads - Russia has railroad engineering units in their military and can repair just about anything you could do to a railroad in a couple of hours, and in fact they do as Ukrainian partisans (rightly) go after railways.
Meanwhile if someone throws spike strips on a busy highway/tunnel/bridge between two chokepoints, you're effectively screwed. If this is done in a concerted manner it will probably take at least a day to fix.
If you have more resources (say a state actor attacking a nation that isn't on a wartime footing), you can also exploit the fact that asphalt is a petroleum fraction and therefore soluble : spill a lot of diesel or hydraulic oil, for example (and optionally set it on fire) and you will unrecoverably ruin that section of asphalt, which could take weeks to fix: this is why gas stations are paved with concrete.
So while it's not as easy to do this as it is to derail a train or screw around a signaling system, it's far more difficult to repair professional roadway sabotage than railway sabotage, and in the end the railways are probably more resilient.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Now that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has occurred, and cheap armed quad-copters are a publicly known thing, I can say this openly:
Are you kidding me? Because we are still petro-centric, we are extremely fragile. For example, the West Coast has a handful of oil refineries. To shut down the West Coast's road traffic it would take one guy, and less than $10,000 in equipment. This could all be accomplished in 3 days, and there are no deployed defenses for this attack vector.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Cars with so much electronics on board are just vulnerable as the worst cellphone out there; always connected may seem a cool buzzword, but in reality means always ready to be exploited.
The reason they're not commonly exploited is that usually who is motivated to do that would rather look for bigger targets that give back more media coverage or potential ransom money.
We could make our railway more resilient to such attacks, but in general why bother ? It is probably cheaper to pay the cost whenever the disruption happens.
At least in times of peace.
There are two issues here though. The first is that the Olympics is a special event and it is more likely for somebody to try to cause the disruptions, and as such more control is probably warranted.
The second is that somebody else (Russia) is not acting like they are at peace with us so we should act accordingly
The railways get hit fairly often in Russia and nearby but while they are easy to knock out they are also easy to repair and are usually back running in a day or two. Large bridges would be an exception.
Cars are vulnerable to attacks on fuel stations, attacks on bridges, dumping a load of nails on the road during rush hour, etc. I’m not sure I’d automatically assume disrupting thousands of car passengers is necessarily harder than disrupting thousands of train passengers.
>It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system.
I get phishing mail with very pertinent information only JR West would know any time I make train or rental car reservations with JR West.
Yes, I am willing to bet hard money that they've been backdoored and/or compromised at the human level. Standard fare for Japanese IT, honestly; see Kadokawa.
Damaging highways isn't exactly hard, even if they don't contain any roads or bridges. And if you take out the highways the rest of the roads don't have nearly enough capacity.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Cars/trucks/roads are so much more dangerous than train travel that it actually seems worth the tradeoff to me even if these sorts of attacks were a regular occurrence. Putin (or whoever did this) sucks but they have not killed 1,105 Americans in a single year. That's just the number of cyclists killed by cars in 2022. Deaths of pedestrians and drivers/passengers are significantly higher.
Why do you assume that it's a "foreign" actor? I think it is utterly idiotic to hold an event of such scale in a country which has seen several consecutive years of mass protests. I mean sure, you can cordon off parts of Paris with fences and razor wire, but you can't do that with all of France.
Because it's the only logical conclusion and multiple Russians have already been arrested in France for plotting to disrupt the Olympics, including one who set himself on fire with chemicals in his hotel room. Oh and Russians have been doing this sort of thing all over Europe for the past few years.
If this were an internal political entity they would have already claimed responsibility and put out a manifesto.
Who needs foreign actors when you have `climate protestors` who traditionally face way too little consequence for their actions and annoy their fellow citizens so persistency they do their entire movement a disservice?
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Hack traffic light controls and set them to all-green (assuming the safety interlock is done in software), all-red, or just off. Dumbass drivers will do the rest for free.
Alternatively, disrupt Google Maps and Waze. Barely anyone has a dedicated offline navigation system any more - take these two out or "suggest" fake traffic jams to overload side streets [1] will also cause a lot of chaos.
> assuming the safety interlock is done in software
It's not. There's a conflict monitor unit that is completely separate from the signal controller.
It has direct inputs from all green or other permissive lights, and a diode matrix that determines which combinations are allowed.[1] If it detects a conflict, all signals go to flashing yellow.
"This monitor uses a standardized programming card for channel compatibility (permissives), minimum flash time, per channel Minimum Yellow Change Disable, CVM latch, and 24 volt monitor latch. Programming of this card is accomplished through the use of soldered wire jumpers. The programming card plugs into the monitor through a slot in the front panel."
All 4-way intersections use the same interlocking pattern, so there's a standard card that covers most cases. Only unusual intersections need a custom programming card soldered up.
>Hack traffic light controls and set them to all-green (assuming the safety interlock is done in software), all-red, or just off. Dumbass drivers will do the rest for free.
Have you never driven during a blackout? People get a little awkward figuring out four way stop priority, but it's not pure chaos.
> On May 7, he was in Russia and due to fly from Moscow to Istanbul, where he’d catch a connecting flight back to Paris the next day. Except he couldn't. He got so fall-down drunk at Istanbul Airport that he was barred from boarding his plane. Instead Griaznov took a taxi to the Bulgarian border, where another car delivered him to St. Vlas, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, where Griaznov owns property.
> Griaznov stayed at his apartment for a few days before moving on to Varna, a Bulgarian city 60 miles north of St. Vlas. From there he flew on to Paris. During one of his beach-side dinners he got drunk again and let slip to the neighbors that he had a special assignment this summer in Paris to disrupt the opening ceremony of the Olympics. At first the neighbors were incredulous. That’s when Griaznov brandished his FSB ID, witnesses told The Insider. A few days later, Griaznov made his way to Varna and took a flight from there. Before flying to Paris, Griaznov made a call to his FSB boss and informed him that the operation was on track. Griaznov even said he’d recruited “one more Moldovan from Chisinau.”
What a failure of our western surveillance organizations that the only spies we catch are the ones that are so bad at their jobs that they get drunk and brag about it.
How do we fail so badly to counter foreign influence, sabotage, and espionage operations?
The examples of successful foreign operations in Western countries is so long and embarrassing - high level people operating for DECADES, changing MAJOR western policies, and sending back to their foreign handlers CRITICAL data and intelligence.
If this continues, we are absolutely going to get destroyed.
This brings to mind the TLA saying of "our successes are secret. our failures are known." In today's counter espionage world, it seems all you have to do to remain invisible is not use tech. Only speak in person face to face. It's not surprising at all to me that spooks can't know everything
How do you know that this is the only spy that was caught? It seems in the west's best interest from a propaganda perspective to paint the FSB in a poor light (to discourage cooperation), and they are obviously selective about what gets disclosed.
> What a failure of our western surveillance organizations that the only spies we catch are the ones that are so bad at their jobs that they get drunk and brag about it.
That's the ones we make public. There's been quite the lot of spies quietly yeeted or exchanged for political hostages. And just as often, it's the other way 'round.
In other news the French rail systems suffered a major outage today, the opening day of the Olympics, as train infrastructure was firebombed by unknown parties.
This is obviously a Russian act of sabotage in retaliation for French support of Ukraine. All the downvotes of their mighty troll army can't make it any less obvious.
Alternatively, you can view it as a OSI layer 1 attack.
A bunch of optic fibers have been cut, but the network was badly designed without redundancy (as evidenced by the current denial of service).
Strategic points (the attacks occurred at junctions of several axis) were left insufficiently guarded.
The location of these points also shouldn't have been made available to bad actors.
French people are not surprised because there are always problems with train when lots of people need them to go on holidays. Usually at this time of the year it's getting hot, and it's one or more electrical transformer that gets burned by high heats. When copper price get high, cables are usually stolen to be sold as metal. And there are also strikes.
There is an economic balance to be found between the cost of securing and maintaining the infrastructure vs fixing the problems once they occur. Probably can be better, but others probably have it much worse.
You can't really guard thousands of kilometers of rails, or have much redundancy considering the cost of the infrastructure. The incesseant budget cuts and progressive privatization certainly do not help.
> On May 7, he was in Russia and due to fly from Moscow to Istanbul, where he’d catch a connecting flight back to Paris the next day. Except he couldn't. He got so fall-down drunk at Istanbul Airport that he was barred from boarding his plane. Instead Griaznov took a taxi to the Bulgarian border, where another car delivered him to St. Vlas, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, where Griaznov owns property.
> Griaznov stayed at his apartment for a few days before moving on to Varna, a Bulgarian city 60 miles north of St. Vlas. From there he flew on to Paris. During one of his beach-side dinners he got drunk again and let slip to the neighbors that he had a special assignment this summer in Paris to disrupt the opening ceremony of the Olympics. At first the neighbors were incredulous. That’s when Griaznov brandished his FSB ID, witnesses told The Insider. A few days later, Griaznov made his way to Varna and took a flight from there. Before flying to Paris, Griaznov made a call to his FSB boss and informed him that the operation was on track. Griaznov even said he’d recruited “one more Moldovan from Chisinau.”
They sow chaos and then unleash the bots criticizing whoever is currently in office; then they unleash bots criticizing those bots and hope to drag in normal people.
Basically the idea is to erode trust in the western system. They don't try to hide it anymore and seems it doesn't matter - it's quite effective anyway.
There is no objective other than to destroy the West and democracy and then rule with as much brutality as the conquered nations will bear. If they cannot achieve that objective they want to go down in flames with the rest of the world.
If you want to know how the Russian peace looks like read up on the partitions of Poland (economic exploitation, violent anti-semitism, deportations to Siberia, confiscation of property and land, russification, etc.) or the history of countries in Eastern Europe who found themselves inside the borders of Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. Persecutions, mass deportations, mass murders, torture, economic exploitation.
I really pity the African nations who got convinced to kick out Americans and the French. They will now get a taste of Russia and it will not be pretty.
They didn't want to get caught. They want to create chaos, which leads to disillusionment, nihilism, infighting and isolationism and a breaking up of the West's unity. Relevant, from the CBS this week:
> The FBI announced it disrupted a Russian AI-enhanced social media bot farm, which was designed to be an influence operation. Some of the fake profiles from bots purported to be Americans.
It's probably quite effective, but we don't know how effective because it's impossible to re-run the last 10 years without this and see what would have happened.
Poisonings, people falling out of windows, arsons, it all make sense if you consider that it is a state captured by a mafia clan. John McCain famously said that Russia is ‘A Gas Station Run by a Mafia That Is Masquerading as a Country’
I think you have to be Russian to fully grasp the motivations behind this.
I've got a lot of mileage out of the assumption that every such act is supposed to send a message both to Russia's enemies and citizens.
The message being "we are everywhere".
Should anyone try to start working with the enemy, like the helicopter pilot Maxim Kuzminov, they will be found and executed.
EDIT: Navalny's return to Russia raised eyebrows in the west. I think he was aware that he would be targeted anyway, so might as well have it happen on his own terms.
They could be embracing the North Korean model. You don't have to be competitive as long as you are untouchable. The elites get wealth and power, and the rest don't matter.
I'm a bit puzzled by this as well but I assume that the goal here is to project power and scare people into submission. Making themselves seem more powerful than they are by attacking an event that is in the public spotlight.
The goal is to get some fact they can use in propaganda internally to show how the country is great or succeeding against its enemies. And yeah, everybody that complains about them is an enemy.
My take is they think they are a great power entitled to rule over their neighbours including the former soviet union and thus are entitled to attack all who oppose that by whatever ways including dumb things like disrupting the olympics and funding anti vaxxer and far right folk and the like. Not that I know that much - I'm kind of confused myself.
To understand anything Russian government does, you need to understand that they aren't a government in the way Western democracies / republics / monarchies understand the function of the government. For someone with largely humanistic outlook on life, the function of the government is to try to make sure that what's being governed prospers. Prosperity may be understood as "more riches for the rich" or "redistribution of wealth" or anywhere in between. But the basic idea is to make things better, at least for some sub-group of thus governed subjects.
Russia is operated by straight-up criminals. And I don't mean white-collar corrupt politicians. They are literally people who committed often very violent crimes. For instance, Putin is implicated in a number of "hits" on law enforcement officers, investigators etc. He was not the one executing the "hits", but he was likely directly involved in the crime. A lot of his associates have done often long time behind bars. For example, his puppet assigned to rule over Ukraine (the one who was deposed in the "revolution of dignity" which set in motion the present conflict) started his career as a gang robber: he, with his friends broke into an apartment, tortured the owners while taking their belongings.
These people have a mental model of the world defined by the prison lore. They have a bizarre set of rules which define what honor is: "honor" (the prison kind of) is the central value / virtue in this system. In this model, the world is divided into "suckers" and "men". "Men" are allowed to humiliate the "suckers" in whatever way they want. In fact, if they don't, they might as well join the "suckers". In this system, anyone who shows any kind of compassion to the "suckers" is him/herself a "sucker". Europeans or anyone who wants to live in a society that values any human life thus is automatically a "sucker".
This is why Russians think and treat Europeans with contempt and disdain. They don't think it to be immoral to steal from a European, or to assault one etc.
It's also "honorable" to accept the risks associated with humiliating the "suckers". To prove how much of a "man" someone is that is. It's actually better to die while proving your place is among "men" than to surrender and live like a "sucker". So, they don't care about international consequences of their sabotage in France today. At least not in the sense how another European country might've cared, should they engage in something similar.
I think about this quite a lot. I presume people at that level are at least TRYING to be strategic in some manner. The two thoughts I used to try and frame it are: the cold war never really ended, it just changed, and, begrudging-capitalist subscribing societies have highly intelligent people in them just like capitalist societies. If nation states are indeed competitive, then a relatively decent strategy would be presume automation is going to rapidly allow for an alternative systems in societies, and while that shift is happening, cause as much problem as you can for the folks unable/unwilling/unknowing, while you start shifting behind the scenes. Marx literally articulated deeply, the idea that socialism, and eventually communism, would arise as a natural progression from capitalism. We may or may not want to accept that, but Marx spelled it out, and lots of people follow Marx as their philosophy.
I try hard to avoid getting conspiratorial in my head, so I tend to leave the thought around that point, after all, it's just a thought. :)
I doubt their goal is to be universally reviled, so what's their real objective?
Believe it or not -- their initial goal was simply to gain respect.
They actually thought the Ukraine invasion would be a walkthrough, and that of course Western countries would whine and moan about of a -- but ultimately they would respect Russia for its audacity and boldness, that Russia would emerge with greatly enhanced stature over its historic rivals, and a new era of Russian gravitas and self-assuredness would begin.
So yes - it was all definitely quite strategic, in theory. But things didn't go as they planned of course, so now they're fighting like a cornered animal.
Except now the fight isn't for "respect", and it certainly isn't about Ukraine -- but rather their own physical and political survival.
It's just like how the terrorists hated us for our freedoms and were hiding weapons of mass destruction. The war machine isn't just gonna keep itself running.
Are any le Carré characters so flagrantly incompetent? Even the ones who like to drink (like Connie Sachs) manage to keep it under control and function reasonably well.
When your culture's drinking problem is so bad that it starts causing information leaks that disrupt clandestine overseas sabotage operations, maybe that's the clue it's time to get a better grip on the culture of alcohol consumption.
I've read that it's not quite as simple or easy as banning vodka or alcohol, as strangely enough, the highest individual source of Russian tax revenue is from excise taxes on the vodka, and revenue from the excise taxes on beer make up 75% as much as the excise taxes on vodka.
Nope, they operate more or less in plain sight and don't care. They know that they worst thing that can happen to them in the west is expulsion or a jail sentence.
Until RT or Putin confirms it was Ruzzia then you won't believe it.
For other real skeptics, there were 100% clear Ruzzian attacks in France before, there were people that drawn Swasticas, some people that put some coffins , soem Chechen guy with a grenade/bomb. We do not have video or written proof that Putin signed the orders so we need to use our brains and ignore the bots and trolls that defend terrorists.
> the attackers had started fires in "conduits carrying multiple (fibre-optic) cables" that relay "safety information for drivers" or control the motors for points that change rails... Farandou of SNCF said: "There's a huge number of bundled cables. We have to repair them one by one, it's a manual operation" requiring "hundreds of workers".
Just wondering: is there a reason why there needs to be a bundle of fiber optic cables to carry safety information and control the rails? Is that not overkill? I assume wireless/cellular networking is not robust enough, but what just standard-ass copper wires, like the telephone lines? I assume the reason is that they're transmitting more than just what was named in the article, but all I know is what I read.
Sometimes fibre optic cables are used for reasons other than lots of bandwidth in architectures other than network A to network B.
Examples:
1. transferring data near/from/to high voltage lines, without risking short circuits that cause fire/death/damage (personal experience: getting info in/out of particle accelerators that hold mega volts of tension)
2. using fibre optic cables to measure vibration or deformations (using the fibre as sensor)
3. physical layer redudancy in case of failure
4. keeping safety critical systems physically seperate from other data transfers
There are probably more reasons that are possibly more on-topic. I'm definitely not a fiber applications expert.
Copper is distance limited. Copper oxidizes. If you are ever going to have any data transfer copper requires powered equipment at very close intervals. Metallic cabling and any equipment on the ends is vulnerable to nearby lightning.
Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete called the “massive attack” against the rail network an “outrageous criminal act”. He described people fleeing from the scene of fires and the discovery of incendiary devices at the sites.
SNCF said many routes would have to be cancelled “at least all weekend while repairs are conducted” as thousands of rail staff were deployed to repair the damage.
There is a massive attack and people fleeing; news orgs will be super aggressive about finding/publishing 1st-hand accounts. I read thru a ½doz articles and couldn't spot any, tho.
If this were the US and NatSec were on the table, we could expect some overstatement of harm done and risk to the public.
IDK France tho. Do French officials favor agenda or accuracy?
Readit News
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240726-sabotage-on-f...
Dead Comment
We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system
The attack on SNCF was not "easy". This was a methodical, large scale, coordinated attack. They knew what to take down. How to take it down with least collateral damage. And when each should be taken down. (Order likely counts here. You're trying to plug up tracks.) Point being, these attacks are not "easy". In a place with as much unrest and discontent as France has bubbling beneath the surface, the trains would go down twice weekly, every week, if it was "easy" to do so.
A similar methodical, large scale, coordinated attack on our bridges would shut the system down as well. I won't even mention some other infrastructural assets that, if targeted, easily will shut us down for months because I think they are just that soft as targets. I honestly believe it would be irresponsible to even put the idea out into the ether.
The takeaway here is that if you're dealing with large organizations, with even a modest amount of resources, and a grievance, you're likely dealing with orgs that have a lot of young people they can send to successfully carry out such attacks. Thankfully, these attacks still require a level of technical knowledge that seems to elude such groups. So it's just matter of keeping that information as secure as possible on the one hand. While working towards security and resilience of those assets on the other.
A mere decade ago this was pure science fiction, but over the past few years it has become a possibility.
Basically every modern car can have software that says "slam the gas pedal as far as possible". Combine that with cars that are heavily integrated into their infotainment system or even include built in wifi and you've got the "over the air signal" covered.
That's why they were able to get some of the trains back to operation: they can't run them as close together as before, but can still use the tracks.
Meanwhile if someone throws spike strips on a busy highway/tunnel/bridge between two chokepoints, you're effectively screwed. If this is done in a concerted manner it will probably take at least a day to fix.
If you have more resources (say a state actor attacking a nation that isn't on a wartime footing), you can also exploit the fact that asphalt is a petroleum fraction and therefore soluble : spill a lot of diesel or hydraulic oil, for example (and optionally set it on fire) and you will unrecoverably ruin that section of asphalt, which could take weeks to fix: this is why gas stations are paved with concrete.
So while it's not as easy to do this as it is to derail a train or screw around a signaling system, it's far more difficult to repair professional roadway sabotage than railway sabotage, and in the end the railways are probably more resilient.
Now that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has occurred, and cheap armed quad-copters are a publicly known thing, I can say this openly:
Are you kidding me? Because we are still petro-centric, we are extremely fragile. For example, the West Coast has a handful of oil refineries. To shut down the West Coast's road traffic it would take one guy, and less than $10,000 in equipment. This could all be accomplished in 3 days, and there are no deployed defenses for this attack vector.
Cars with so much electronics on board are just vulnerable as the worst cellphone out there; always connected may seem a cool buzzword, but in reality means always ready to be exploited. The reason they're not commonly exploited is that usually who is motivated to do that would rather look for bigger targets that give back more media coverage or potential ransom money.
Which shows a cultural disaster - an idiocracy - that should be taken as a priority.
At least in times of peace.
There are two issues here though. The first is that the Olympics is a special event and it is more likely for somebody to try to cause the disruptions, and as such more control is probably warranted.
The second is that somebody else (Russia) is not acting like they are at peace with us so we should act accordingly
This was at least 4 different actors, perhaps 4 different groups of actors, executing a coordinated action simultaneously.
I get phishing mail with very pertinent information only JR West would know any time I make train or rental car reservations with JR West.
Yes, I am willing to bet hard money that they've been backdoored and/or compromised at the human level. Standard fare for Japanese IT, honestly; see Kadokawa.
Cars/trucks/roads are so much more dangerous than train travel that it actually seems worth the tradeoff to me even if these sorts of attacks were a regular occurrence. Putin (or whoever did this) sucks but they have not killed 1,105 Americans in a single year. That's just the number of cyclists killed by cars in 2022. Deaths of pedestrians and drivers/passengers are significantly higher.
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2024-06-24/us-...
caltrops could also paralyse entire highways
also bridges
I could also imagine that it's not difficult to insert sugar into gas stations
If this were an internal political entity they would have already claimed responsibility and put out a manifesto.
It's frightening how easy it is to establish as a cultural norm that guessing is proper thinking.
Dead Comment
Hack traffic light controls and set them to all-green (assuming the safety interlock is done in software), all-red, or just off. Dumbass drivers will do the rest for free.
Alternatively, disrupt Google Maps and Waze. Barely anyone has a dedicated offline navigation system any more - take these two out or "suggest" fake traffic jams to overload side streets [1] will also cause a lot of chaos.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-ar...
It's not. There's a conflict monitor unit that is completely separate from the signal controller. It has direct inputs from all green or other permissive lights, and a diode matrix that determines which combinations are allowed.[1] If it detects a conflict, all signals go to flashing yellow. "This monitor uses a standardized programming card for channel compatibility (permissives), minimum flash time, per channel Minimum Yellow Change Disable, CVM latch, and 24 volt monitor latch. Programming of this card is accomplished through the use of soldered wire jumpers. The programming card plugs into the monitor through a slot in the front panel."
All 4-way intersections use the same interlocking pattern, so there's a standard card that covers most cases. Only unusual intersections need a custom programming card soldered up.
[1] https://www.editraffic.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/MMU2-1...
Have you never driven during a blackout? People get a little awkward figuring out four way stop priority, but it's not pure chaos.
https://theins.press/en/politics/273350
> On May 7, he was in Russia and due to fly from Moscow to Istanbul, where he’d catch a connecting flight back to Paris the next day. Except he couldn't. He got so fall-down drunk at Istanbul Airport that he was barred from boarding his plane. Instead Griaznov took a taxi to the Bulgarian border, where another car delivered him to St. Vlas, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, where Griaznov owns property.
> Griaznov stayed at his apartment for a few days before moving on to Varna, a Bulgarian city 60 miles north of St. Vlas. From there he flew on to Paris. During one of his beach-side dinners he got drunk again and let slip to the neighbors that he had a special assignment this summer in Paris to disrupt the opening ceremony of the Olympics. At first the neighbors were incredulous. That’s when Griaznov brandished his FSB ID, witnesses told The Insider. A few days later, Griaznov made his way to Varna and took a flight from there. Before flying to Paris, Griaznov made a call to his FSB boss and informed him that the operation was on track. Griaznov even said he’d recruited “one more Moldovan from Chisinau.”
It would be humorous if it weren't so serious.
The article exists on both though
https://theins.ru/en/politics/273350
How do we fail so badly to counter foreign influence, sabotage, and espionage operations?
The examples of successful foreign operations in Western countries is so long and embarrassing - high level people operating for DECADES, changing MAJOR western policies, and sending back to their foreign handlers CRITICAL data and intelligence.
If this continues, we are absolutely going to get destroyed.
You only hearing about this one doesn't mean anything.
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That's the ones we make public. There's been quite the lot of spies quietly yeeted or exchanged for political hostages. And just as often, it's the other way 'round.
Basically, Western leaders can't hear you over the sound of how awesome they're trying to tell you they are.
This is obviously a Russian act of sabotage in retaliation for French support of Ukraine. All the downvotes of their mighty troll army can't make it any less obvious.
Dead Comment
A bunch of optic fibers have been cut, but the network was badly designed without redundancy (as evidenced by the current denial of service).
Strategic points (the attacks occurred at junctions of several axis) were left insufficiently guarded.
The location of these points also shouldn't have been made available to bad actors.
French people are not surprised because there are always problems with train when lots of people need them to go on holidays. Usually at this time of the year it's getting hot, and it's one or more electrical transformer that gets burned by high heats. When copper price get high, cables are usually stolen to be sold as metal. And there are also strikes.
There is an economic balance to be found between the cost of securing and maintaining the infrastructure vs fixing the problems once they occur. Probably can be better, but others probably have it much worse.
Apparently they did not catch all the arson teams.
https://theins.press/en/politics/273350
> On May 7, he was in Russia and due to fly from Moscow to Istanbul, where he’d catch a connecting flight back to Paris the next day. Except he couldn't. He got so fall-down drunk at Istanbul Airport that he was barred from boarding his plane. Instead Griaznov took a taxi to the Bulgarian border, where another car delivered him to St. Vlas, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, where Griaznov owns property.
> Griaznov stayed at his apartment for a few days before moving on to Varna, a Bulgarian city 60 miles north of St. Vlas. From there he flew on to Paris. During one of his beach-side dinners he got drunk again and let slip to the neighbors that he had a special assignment this summer in Paris to disrupt the opening ceremony of the Olympics. At first the neighbors were incredulous. That’s when Griaznov brandished his FSB ID, witnesses told The Insider. A few days later, Griaznov made his way to Varna and took a flight from there. Before flying to Paris, Griaznov made a call to his FSB boss and informed him that the operation was on track. Griaznov even said he’d recruited “one more Moldovan from Chisinau.”
It would be humorous if it weren't so serious.
I doubt their goal is to be universally reviled, so what's their real objective?
As much as I'm tempted to think they're just being full-on assholes, I assume they're being more strategic than that.
Basically the idea is to erode trust in the western system. They don't try to hide it anymore and seems it doesn't matter - it's quite effective anyway.
If you want to know how the Russian peace looks like read up on the partitions of Poland (economic exploitation, violent anti-semitism, deportations to Siberia, confiscation of property and land, russification, etc.) or the history of countries in Eastern Europe who found themselves inside the borders of Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. Persecutions, mass deportations, mass murders, torture, economic exploitation.
I really pity the African nations who got convinced to kick out Americans and the French. They will now get a taste of Russia and it will not be pretty.
> The FBI announced it disrupted a Russian AI-enhanced social media bot farm, which was designed to be an influence operation. Some of the fake profiles from bots purported to be Americans.
Some other examples:
- https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
- https://openai.com/index/disrupting-deceptive-uses-of-AI-by-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_Black_Lives_Matter
It's probably quite effective, but we don't know how effective because it's impossible to re-run the last 10 years without this and see what would have happened.
I've got a lot of mileage out of the assumption that every such act is supposed to send a message both to Russia's enemies and citizens.
The message being "we are everywhere".
Should anyone try to start working with the enemy, like the helicopter pilot Maxim Kuzminov, they will be found and executed.
EDIT: Navalny's return to Russia raised eyebrows in the west. I think he was aware that he would be targeted anyway, so might as well have it happen on his own terms.
As to be reviled, some don't care, as long as they're feared.
Here's Keir Giles, who wrote a related book, talking a bit. https://youtu.be/j8wVuHMAEHg?t=688
Russia is operated by straight-up criminals. And I don't mean white-collar corrupt politicians. They are literally people who committed often very violent crimes. For instance, Putin is implicated in a number of "hits" on law enforcement officers, investigators etc. He was not the one executing the "hits", but he was likely directly involved in the crime. A lot of his associates have done often long time behind bars. For example, his puppet assigned to rule over Ukraine (the one who was deposed in the "revolution of dignity" which set in motion the present conflict) started his career as a gang robber: he, with his friends broke into an apartment, tortured the owners while taking their belongings.
These people have a mental model of the world defined by the prison lore. They have a bizarre set of rules which define what honor is: "honor" (the prison kind of) is the central value / virtue in this system. In this model, the world is divided into "suckers" and "men". "Men" are allowed to humiliate the "suckers" in whatever way they want. In fact, if they don't, they might as well join the "suckers". In this system, anyone who shows any kind of compassion to the "suckers" is him/herself a "sucker". Europeans or anyone who wants to live in a society that values any human life thus is automatically a "sucker".
This is why Russians think and treat Europeans with contempt and disdain. They don't think it to be immoral to steal from a European, or to assault one etc.
It's also "honorable" to accept the risks associated with humiliating the "suckers". To prove how much of a "man" someone is that is. It's actually better to die while proving your place is among "men" than to surrender and live like a "sucker". So, they don't care about international consequences of their sabotage in France today. At least not in the sense how another European country might've cared, should they engage in something similar.
I try hard to avoid getting conspiratorial in my head, so I tend to leave the thought around that point, after all, it's just a thought. :)
Because they stand no chance fighting fare and square.
Believe it or not -- their initial goal was simply to gain respect.
They actually thought the Ukraine invasion would be a walkthrough, and that of course Western countries would whine and moan about of a -- but ultimately they would respect Russia for its audacity and boldness, that Russia would emerge with greatly enhanced stature over its historic rivals, and a new era of Russian gravitas and self-assuredness would begin.
So yes - it was all definitely quite strategic, in theory. But things didn't go as they planned of course, so now they're fighting like a cornered animal.
Except now the fight isn't for "respect", and it certainly isn't about Ukraine -- but rather their own physical and political survival.
Dead Comment
I've read that it's not quite as simple or easy as banning vodka or alcohol, as strangely enough, the highest individual source of Russian tax revenue is from excise taxes on the vodka, and revenue from the excise taxes on beer make up 75% as much as the excise taxes on vodka.
Further reading: https://warontherocks.com/2015/07/little-water-vodka-and-the...
https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1985-2/anti-alcohol-campaign/
It has to be a decoy of sorts right?
Dead Comment
For other real skeptics, there were 100% clear Ruzzian attacks in France before, there were people that drawn Swasticas, some people that put some coffins , soem Chechen guy with a grenade/bomb. We do not have video or written proof that Putin signed the orders so we need to use our brains and ignore the bots and trolls that defend terrorists.
nice to see the political wokeness affecting hnews.
Just wondering: is there a reason why there needs to be a bundle of fiber optic cables to carry safety information and control the rails? Is that not overkill? I assume wireless/cellular networking is not robust enough, but what just standard-ass copper wires, like the telephone lines? I assume the reason is that they're transmitting more than just what was named in the article, but all I know is what I read.
Examples:
1. transferring data near/from/to high voltage lines, without risking short circuits that cause fire/death/damage (personal experience: getting info in/out of particle accelerators that hold mega volts of tension)
2. using fibre optic cables to measure vibration or deformations (using the fibre as sensor)
3. physical layer redudancy in case of failure
4. keeping safety critical systems physically seperate from other data transfers
There are probably more reasons that are possibly more on-topic. I'm definitely not a fiber applications expert.
If this were the US and NatSec were on the table, we could expect some overstatement of harm done and risk to the public.
IDK France tho. Do French officials favor agenda or accuracy?
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