ATLSECCON 2025

How hard do you think it would be to disable our civilization? Not as hard as you think.

The daily services, apps, and financial transactions that our civilization now depends on all require and assume the presence of a fully functioning and speedy Internet that can reach "The Cloud" of various large virtual datacenter platform providers.  Do  you remember where you were during the national Rogers netowrk outage in 2022?

"The Cloud" really is just someone else's computer.  All of those services and virtual servers depend on a massive amount of real physical servers, network equipment, and cabling that exists inside of data centers.  Those data centers are connected to your businesses, homes, schools, and phones via a complex web of aerial fiber optic cables attached to utility poles, or in underground conduits.  Our countries and continents are primarily interconnected with fiber optic cables that run under the sea.  The space based satellite Internet systems all require a connection to the fiber optic networks to function. All of that fiber is utilized by connecting it to the vast array of telecommunications equipment that is located in downtown carrier hotels, neighborhood cell tower sites, and roadside cabinets.   The Internet is a complex system that works surprisingly well, until it doesn't.   

We want to have a frank discussion about these risks. We will present some scenarios and outage possibilities that you may not have considered such as targeted intentional sabotage, terrorism, wars, natural disasters, electric grid outages, ransomware in the data center, the fiber optic cable seeking backhoe, and the ever popular "plain old human error" at scale.  

We will also discuss some mitigations for these risks, recommendations for critical infrastructure owners, and give you some actionable recommendations for how to stay connected.