Cyber Attack question 1

[normntwrk]

Perhaps this is the wrong forum but just trying to get an understanding of digital telephone circuits / vs VOIP

If the Internet for the US was attacked severly enough to effectivly shut down the Internet(such as what happened in the country of Georgia) would that affect telephone service to a business that is supplied with digital circuits (Not VOIP) to a PBX ?

Thanks
Norm

 

[mikeyb123]

yes and no....

as the providers backbone is now all voip it wouldn't matter what the last mile ccts were

It's not getting any smarter out there. You have to come to terms with stupidity, and make it work for you.

 

[normntwrk]

So for instance you are using a POTS line for an plain old modem is that converted to digital on the backbone and back to analog at the other end ?

The reason I ask is for business continuity, right now if our T1 goes down we can for instance connect to a customer with a modem via POTS line or through our PBX via digital to analog conversion

 

[Dexman]

It is not unusual for service providers to use TDM (POTs) to interface with customers, but convert to VoIP between their facilities.

If it ain't broke, I haven't fixed it yet.

 

[donb01]

Doing telecom for a healthcare network I'm curious about this subject.

Are you knowledgeable enough to quote a percentage of screwedness for US telecom if the internet goes down?

Are we talking even the so-called "rural" and small metropolitan areas that may not have enough money to implement this yet so they may be able to make calls in their regional areas, or is the whole country going to go quiet?

 

[normntwrk]

It apparently has the FBI worried...

Yesterday, the FBI announced it considers cyber attacks to be the third greatest threat to the security of the United States. The only two preceding it are nuclear war and weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

 

[lopes1211]

I'm not aware of any provider who's backbone is the internet (except maybe magicjack...lol). They are all private or leased fiber (it is the PSTN, not the internet carrying the calls). Even Vonage uses the internet for just the last mile into a customer residence, not for internal and/or PSTN communications.

-CL

 

[Dexman]

Companies like Verizon are beginning to implement soft switches that are TDM towards customers and other providers, but use a private Intranet (I think that is the term) to connect to other Verizon soft switches.

If it ain't broke, I haven't fixed it yet.

 

[Sympology]

People are confusing the internet with IP.

The internet is a bunch of computers loosley connected together in a wonderful mish-mash of technologies.

The telcos are rolling out IP connections using dedicated links (in the UK BT are rolling out 21CN). The main difference is simply the signalling and hardware attached. They are still likely to shove it down the same fibre as before, just send and receive it differently. This way they have full controll of traffic flow and QoS.
The advantage they can provide is if you site is IP enabled, in theiry, there is no need to do any signalling conversion.

It is not the internet, which basically put, is a best effort network. If it gets there, great, if not, oh well.

If a Telco is running via the internet,be afraid.

As for the FBI saying it's the 3rd biggest threat, of course it is, otherwise how will they get that multi-billion dollar funding ;-)



Most people spend their time on the "urgent" rather than on the "important."

 

[donb01]

I'm not going to even form a hint that I know anything about VOIP yet other than basic terminology, but....

Doesn't any kind of IP platform need some kind of master gateway or DNS or something so stuff knows where to route to? Otherwise how do Verizon's IPs know how to find AT&T's IPs and the like?... There has to be some central "IP God" that knows which blocks are registered to what countries and zones and etc and how to route between them.

Would this not be the same type of gateway needed by the rest of the internet to route IP from place to place? (Yes, I know how DNS works, but I'm talking IP)...

So if something were to happen to this central gateway or routing thing that knows all about the IPs, would that not take down both the internet and telephony, or any thing else "wide area" that is IP-based?



So

 

[Deweyhumbolt]

I'll stick in my 2 cents as a former Outside Plant Tech. at the old Pacific Telephone/Pac Bell/AT&T. Everything from your house looking back to the CO. is copper. I know they could have DSL, T1, PRI, 56K, or POTS, but they all go back to a Telco switch, 5ESS, DMS100, etc. Then between COs there is copper, and of course fiber. I believe these are talking through Telco switches.

Then the backbone cables that run across the country are copper and fiber talking to telephone switches. I want to understand how far has VoIP, or IP supplanting the PSTN backbone come, where a cyber attack would shutdown the PSTN?



Adversity is Opportunity

 

[biglebowski]

I don't know about the US but most providers have or are switching to MPLS. BTs 21CN is MPLS over fibre. We deal with contact centres who want resilience, the mpls backbone is seperate to the tinternet. Providers can communicate with each other but these are not internet based gateways.

When I was born I was so suprised I didn't talk for 18 months

 

[biglebowski]

Just found some good info about mpls on wiki

MPLS is more reliable than IPSec VPNs as there is less complication in the tunnelling and firewall configuration. Network intrusions are a greater concern with IPSec VPN tunnels since they are run through an Internet circuit, which is open to connections from around the world. A misconfigured firewall can open the VPN network to security threats of the Internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching

When I was born I was so suprised I didn't talk for 18 months

 

[lopes1211]

not sure if that's "good info" as we're getting hung up on terminolgy and different network topology vs different networks. LEC's communicate via a closed private network called the Public Switched Telephone Network i.e. PSTN in addition to their own internal networks. They use many reliable, private, dedicated transport methods like dark fiber, oc48/12/3, VOIP, mpls, atm. The original question was what if the internet goes down.....what will it do to the PSTN? The answer is NO IMPACT AT ALL as PSTN and INTERNET are 100% seperate networks.

Can someone put Voice Traffic on the internet? of course. Is that PSTN?.... No it is not. Could the internet go down and impact voice? sure. to what extent? maybe less than 1% of the US traffic whose users should already know they are using non PSTN voice? Examples of non-pstn would be Vonage, magicjack, VPN phones, VPN softphones, or private IP trunking via VPN brick/tunnels. The internet going down would not impact 99.5% of people making phone calls. .35% would probably be corporate point to point communications which probably has PSTN backup anyway. .15% would be the household Vonage users.

I guess what I'm trying to say is you would have to look hard to see any impact at all on US voice traffic from the internet going down.

-CL

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

I just realized this could be used the wrong way. Norm could be a terrorist looking for a weak spot and here we all are explaining what can and cant be done!

No offense Norm lol

JohnThePhoneGuy

"If I can't fix it, it's not broke!

 

[normntwrk]

You don't anything to worry about from me, I'm (me and my PIX fending off about 35,000 attacks a day on our firewall

Good info here guys, thanks

Norm

 

[RyanEOD]

John,

I thought of exactly that and thus why I didn't reply at all . . .

 

[Deweyhumbolt]

Thanks lopes1211, just wanted verification.

If he's a terrorist, then we just proved to him, it can't be done.

Adversity is Opportunity

 

[Notsetinstone]

I have a cell phone.

http://www.nu-tel.com