9 ms·
German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage
- fabian2k 4y agoThis was reported to be caused by severed cables in two different places. And I read some speculation/claims that this cut the primary and the backup systems simultaneously, which would explain why this lead to a complete outage in a system that should have quite some redundancy. Of course we don't really have enough reliable information right now, but it looks a bit like this would require quite a bit of detailed internal knowledge to know which two cables you need to cut to shut this down entirely. Which would suggest more sophisticated actors might be responsible for this.
- tastroder 4y agoWhile the GSM-R system belongs to the rail system which is dubbed critical infrastructure much of it is either publicly documented and/or shared between a rather large number of operators. So far I didn't read anything that would indicate that this disruption required more than somewhat specialized domain knowledge and a bit of experience in the industry.
- bombcar 4y agoIf they were cut simultaneously or close enough AND they weren’t routed together (I’ve seen cases where the main fiber and backup fiber were in the same trench for a distance, backhoe magnet) then it’s pretty good guess it’s intentional sabotage. However if one line had been cut at some point earlier and they were ON the backup line when that got cut, it could be sabots or it could just be generic construction mistakes/idiocy.
- LaputanMachine 4y agoApparently two lines were sabotaged earlier today, one in Berlin and one in Dortmund [1]. The two cities are around 500km / 300mi apart. [1]: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/deutsche-bahn-derzeit-kein-fernverkehr-in-norddeutschland-a-3e03e230-ae20-463d-a91c-da6edfec8bf6 https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/deutsche-bahn-derzeit-kein-f...
- moogly 4y agoJust cut, not stolen? Has Germany been spared from overhead line theft? It's been a regular thing in Sweden for a decade or so. https://www.thelocal.se/20120404/40090/ https://www.thelocal.se/20120404/40090/ https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-08-11-copper-thefts-cost-the-swedish-transport-administration-six-million---get-help-from-the-police.HJBXaeRglK.html https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-08-11-copper-thefts-c... They're also now stealing copper sheets from graveyard buildings and church doors, plus grave adornments.
- amelius 4y agoPerhaps the thieves had to run and leave the cable?
- Archelaos 4y agoAccording to the news magazin Der Spiegel, cables in two cable ducts were cut. One in Berlin and one in Dortmund (400 km away). -- Source: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/deutsche-bahn-derzeit-kein-fernverkehr-in-norddeutschland-a-3e03e230-ae20-463d-a91c-da6edfec8bf6 https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/deutsche-bahn-derzeit-kein-f... (in German)
- jaclaz 4y agoIt is not clear if it is copper (communication, not power) cables or fibre.
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoMaybe I am tinfoiling too hard... In February this year there was an attack against Vodafone Portugal that brought down their whole mobile networks, 4G, 5G, and fiber, taking them several days to bring everything back up [0]. It also very clearly was a state actor, no threats, no ransom, sophisticated. Taking down pipelines, taking down comms, taking down transport infrastructure. All within a few months. Always on NATO targets, always localized, never claimed with any statements, always sophisticated enough that it would require knowledgeable state actors. It all seems like a training ground to find out if they can do it and probably a message to NATO members to not assume they are safe. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/vodafone-portugal-struggles-to-restore-service-following-cyberattack/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/vodaf...
- rongopo 4y agoSame feelings about those bridges in Italy not too long ago.
- Semaphor 4y agoI’m feeling that way, too, but I’m also aware of confirmation bias (or maybe it’s a different bias?), similar things might happen normally, but we don’t remember them because they are unrelated events in other years, yet now we make connections where none are. > always sophisticated enough that it would require knowledgeable state actors. Maybe I’m missing something, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here?
- captainmuon 4y agoYeah but I would assume the same attack is not going to be successfully against the same target a second time. So they are essentially providing free pentesting. And creating a climate that allows governments to introduce much stronger security measures. Without creating much actual damage. Also I wonder if it was a physical oder purely software attack? If it was a physical attack on a critical system, it could have been anybody, not just state actors.
- gberger 4y ago
- fit2rule 4y ago
- cm2187 4y agoI get sabotage. But why international sabotage?
- HKH2 4y agoPerhaps you read 'intentional' too quickly.
- cm2187 4y agokind of humiliating!
- bombcar 4y agoWe’ve had cases of workers intentionally sabotaging a system to get a day off. Not saying it’s that, but everyone jumping to “Putin activated his sleeper cell in Germany to … delay trains THREE hours” seems kind of silly. Unless a 3 hour delay in Germany is like a seven day shut down elsewhere.
- tastroder 4y agoIt's not, especially on the weekend. The freight delays might be somewhat of an issue over the next few days but on the passenger side it's a mild inconvenience at best. It disrupted the rail network country-wide to some degree but the public rail infrastructure in Germany isn't really known for it's reliability anyway.
- jaza 4y agoGerman rail not known for its reliability... really?! Perhaps not in Germany. But in most other countries, German rail is perceived to be very reliable. And compared to rail in most other countries, German rail is very reliable!
- dathinab 4y agoCompared to e.g. Japan and some other countries long distance trains in Germany are _very_ unreliable. Compared to some other countries it is extremely reliable. Local train service reliability differs quite a bit depending on region and sometimes in region which exact train you take. And perception of reliability can differ from reality, e.g. Berlin people always complain about how unreliable their public transportation is, but due to high frequency of the transportation and a tight nitted 3-4 layer transportation net it is in effect really not that bad. Sure there are a few places where you e.g. reliable miss a follow up connection. But you can calculate that in and with delay times included it is still better then what you find in many other places in the word. So uh, perception is it's a catastrophe, but practice is it's far behind Tokio but not that bad at all in general (for most connections).
- blueflow 4y agoDoes anyone have information on which system was affected? GSM-R or the ESTW uplink?
- b15h0p 4y agoThis Spiegel article mentions GSM-R https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/deutsche-bahn-derzeit-kein-fernverkehr-in-norddeutschland-a-3e03e230-ae20-463d-a91c-da6edfec8bf6 https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/deutsche-bahn-derzeit-kein-f...
- terhechte 4y agoI'm sitting on a train in northern Germany right now. We're invited to a wedding, we were supposed to take a train at 8:45, it is 14:45 now and we're not even halfway there. The whole thing is crazy chaotic because the delayed trains now compete for space on the same train tracks. Too many people are trying to enter the trains so that the trains wait in the individual train stations until the police comes and forces people out. I think this will continue to derail the whole system for the whole weekend.
- rongopo 4y agoI know first hand, normally due to autumnal storms... never reaching and finding hotels full, we ended up sleeping once in the office of a friend.
- coffeeblack 4y agoI went from south to north and back a few days ago. Both times the train was almost an hour late. News should report when German trains are on time for a change.
- harha 4y agoSounds to me like they’re operating as usual.
- kotaKat 4y agoWhy do I feel like the 'sabotage' was small woodland creatures and coincidences? We just had a major outage in prod at our ISP last month because squirrels and rats took out nearly 800 feet of fiber, requiring a full replacement of the section in lieu of splicing individual strands back together.
- aaron695 4y ago
- dathinab 4y agoIn case anyone things this has anything to do with the current Russia situation, it most likely has not. Stuff like that happens every few years on larger scale and sometimes multiple times a year on smaller scale (e.g. part of Berlin local trains not going because of it). A lot of this sabotage comes from people trying to steal cables, but then also sometimes giving up in the process. Then there a climate crazed people which in a twisted way blame the trains for partially causing the climate crisis because they are too expensive... There are also two or three other radicalized movements which in twisted and less twisted ways use the DB as a representative for the "evil state/system" and then jump from there to sabotaging the train service, not limited to the DB (sounds stupid? it is, but happens anyway). The only thing special in this case is how many lines had been affected, not that it happened.
- widerporst 4y agoCables in both Berlin and Dortmund were severed around the same time. This smells of a larger, coordinated oepration.
- mirko22 4y agoYes there are bunch of crazy people doing this stuff coordinated. Lookup letzte generation. There are probably others, I’m not really following it too close.
- dathinab 4y agoNot really. It's not hard to pull off you just need around 4 people, maybe 2 would work, too. Getting illegal short term access to the cables around there long runs isn't hard. Like at all. Finding which cable need to be cut is a bit harder but not too hard either. (It's not a state secret or anything, there are quite a bunch of people which know stuff like that. Worse just by following news in recent years about what interruptions cable theft caused is probably enough to find out where you need to cut cables.) Sure it involves a bit of planing and research etc. But nothing which is beyond what a small handful of misguided but not very stupid people can archive. And in my experience people in the group I mentioned are not stupid at all, misguided sure, but not stupid.
- sazz 4y ago"We know that at two different locations in Germany the cables were cut wantonly and deliberately." What an expression of infantility. What will happen next? Germany-wide internet blackout because someone accidentally pulled the power cable from the router?
- sazz 4y agoThanks for all the downvotes. The point is - how can such a neuralgic facility not be secured? Deutsche Bahn is part of the critical infrastructure - and no one has carried out a vulnerability analysis? No one has thought about how this critical infrastructure can be attacked? According to the newspaper WELT AM SONNTAG, a team of forensic experts is now at work. So it must be a place that can be entered, manipulated and left without being secured and without causing a stir? Every $5 VPS server is obviously better secured than this facility. And I still say: this is unparalleled infantility.
- Jon_Lowtek 4y agoHow exactly did your brain turn "cable that runs along the train track" into a "neuralgic facility"? Your seem to think this a problem of uncontrolled physical access, when it is about redundancy and why cutting so few cables can create a service outage in large parts of north-western germany. Did you know that, by cutting just a few cables, overland lines that are easily accessible, large parts of the USA would have electricity blackouts? That we would need cameras and fences and motion detectors and security checkpoints along thousands of kilometers of cables to secure physical access? Even if we bury them instead of running them overland? As if digging is hard. The problem is not about access to some facility, it is about a lack of redundancy in what should be a network.
- blumomo 4y agoCoincidentally there are very big demonstrations scheduled for today in Berlin. Trains not running to Berlin is definitely reducing the amount of participants joining these events. Just saying.
- archi42 4y agoThere is probably also at least one police or military or intelligence training camp happening right now in northern Germany. Just saying.
- hugh-avherald 4y agoFor what cause?
- s9w 4y ago
- marijnz 4y agoFor the (far) right-wing party AFD https://berlinspectator.com/2022/10/08/berlin-extremist-far-right-afd-stages-protest-2/ https://berlinspectator.com/2022/10/08/berlin-extremist-far-...
- blumomo 4y agoAs if they were the only organizing events. There’s so many more „right“ events happening today organized by people who want nothing more than freedom and a common sense and truth loving government. Citing „AfD“ doesn’t do favor to all the other events today who don’t need vicinity to „AfD“. Today anyone who opposes the official perspectives is automatically „right“, isn’t he?
- Jon_Lowtek 4y agothe berlin event was organized by the AfD, an ethno-nationalist party, under the motto "germany first". They are fishing in the social-liberal circles claiming to be in favor of freedom and truth, but they run a well oiled propaganda machine and would rule with an iron fist should they ever take power.
- locallost 4y agoWhat's peculiar is that the railway itself used the word "sabotage". Interruptions happen all the time and the description is usually just a specific thing that happened - damage to the grid, snow, suicide... In comparison, sabotage has very strong implications, as if they want people to assume something.
- atq2119 4y agoNah, train delay "explanations" are typically quite vague. Consider the famous "Verzögerung wegen Verzögerung im Betriebsablauf" (delay due to delays in operations). Also, they never mention suicides, in the same way that suicides are not reported on by media in general. I believe it gets coded as "emergency medical services" (well, "Notarzteinsatz"), which can of course have non-suicide causes as well.
- Garlef 4y agoMy guess would be that it's sabotage from the left wing since there's a right wing protest today in Berlin that is done mostly by non-Berliners. (There's also a lot of busses bringing in protesters.) There was a similar (co-)incident a few years ago.
- nik736 4y ago10 years ago I was commuting by train to work in Germany and there were fiber cables alongside the train tracks visible just hanging there. One could easily just cut them.
- mk89 4y agoI can't believe that deutsche bahn can finally use "sabotage" as an excuse for its delays!! :)