Miles Associates LLC

The fiber-optic outage—actually sabotage—in the Bay Area on Thursday reveals a dirty little secret: Our infrastructure is ridiculously vulnerable and it only takes a few vandals (or terrorists) to bring communication to its knees.

While it’s unclear what exactly happened, AT&T is offering a $100,000 now $250,000 reward to find the vandals that cut into fiber optic wires and whacked everything from hosting centers, 911 calls and other communication. Sam said it best: No matter how advanced we get we’re still hooked up to a big wire somewhere.

That’s not going to change. The big question: How are we going to protect those big wires?

via Jason Hiner at AT&T fiber outage shows how easily attackers could wipe out our communications | Tech Sanity Check | TechRepublic.com.