Much of Middle East, India Lose Internet Access
An under-the-Mediterranean cable was damaged today -- they don't know how -- and much of the Middle East has LOST INTERNET ACCESS. Some 70 percent of Egyptian users can't connect, and widespread outages are reported in Dubai (including Internet City and Knowledge Village), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. India has also "suffered a 60% disruption."




Comments:
It's a new "suicide packet", if you change the Time To Live field to a real number instead of an integer you can use a fractional number to destroy a fiber link. A few thousand large packets with a TTL of 3.6 hops can take out a standard terrestrial fiber, but it probably takes a coordinated effort of jumbo frames to take down an undersea cable.
This may be bigger than we think, they're up to a third cut cable. Either this is some horrible coincidence and exposes a weakness in the depth of gulf cables or it's an active attack. The UK is probably the most susceptible to this, nearly all of their cables go through the Channel. There are enough landing sites on both the East and West coast of the US to be crippling by an individual attack, but a coordinated effort would mean we could only download porn from US servers...
The TTL field in an IP packet is 8 bits, and in order for there to be any kind of fractional number expressed in an 8 bit field there has to be a delimiter for a decimal place. any link/OS reading an IP header will read it as an 8 bit integer. There is no way to express a TTL in an IP packet as a non-integer real number.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the - Prince Charles Hologram Speaks At Energy Summit?
Prince Charles Hologram Speaks At Energy Summit
Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:35p.m
A 3D image of Prince Charles is to deliver a speech at an international energy summit in Abu Dhabi to try and reduce carbon emissions.
The five minute video was recorded about a month ago and will be beamed onto a film set to create a hologram of Charles, who will then hand the floor over to his brother Prince Andrew who is attending the conference in person.
The hologram will save the 15 tonnes of carbon dioxide that would have been generated by Charles if he and his staff had flown to Abu-Dhabi.
The summit in the United Arab Emirates will focus on the nation's attempt to create the world's first zero-waste and zero-emission city at Masdar.
Video
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