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And let's not forget the premise is all wrong as well. It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system The attack

And let's not forget the premise is all wrong as well. It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system The attack on SNCF was not "easy". This was a methodical, large scale, coordinated attack. They knew what to take down. How to take it down with least collateral damage. And when each should be taken down. (Order likely counts here. You're trying to plug up tracks.) Point being, these attacks are not "easy". In a place with as much unrest and discontent as France has bubbling beneath the surface, the trains would go down twice weekly, every week, if it was "easy" to do so. A similar methodical, large scale, coordinated attack on our bridges would shut the system down as well. I won't even mention some other infrastructural assets that, if targeted, easily will shut us down for months because I think they are just that soft as targets. I honestly believe it would be irresponsible to even put the idea out into the ether. The takeaway here is that if you're dealing with large organizations, with even a modest amount of resources, and a grievance, you're likely dealing with orgs that have a lot of young people they can send to successfully carry out such attacks. Thankfully, these attacks still require a level of technical knowledge that seems to elude such groups. So it's just matter of keeping that information as secure as possible on the one hand. While working towards security and resilience of those assets on the other.

nine_k 2y ago
I'd say that it's "easy" with regard of the resources on the spot. No hundreds of brain-washed fanatics. No tons of explosives. No extensive concealed digging or something similar. No desperate suicide attacks or hot chases or anything else highly visible. Apparently no bucketloads of cash. It looks more like an elaborately prepared barbecue party: careful planning, getting all the details figured out ahead of time, coordination and, well, relatively calm execution.
tjansen 2y ago
I think it’s easy in the sense that it was only a single day attack of probably not more than a few people. What would happen if 50 foreign agents would do this every day over the course of months or years?
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  This required a lot more than 50. There was a lot of planning and execution on this. Maybe foreign agents could do it with 50? If they were supported by satellites and other tools to which these attackers likely did not have access. But foreign agents are operating in relatively large teams even for simple missions. I don't think with this level of coordination, and this number of targets, spread over this large a geographic area, any intelligence agency is going to send one guy/gal per target. It only works like that in Bourne and 007 movies.
AshamedCaptain 2y ago
You are seriously understimating how easy it is to burn an electrical substation. It is actually a frequent occurrence in France (as seen on TV these days..) and everywhere else. Almost as frequent as copper thefts. Close to where I live they famously left a silicon foundry powerless for a day (with the consequent astronomical bill to restart it) by setting fire to one specific bridge. The only novel thing here is coordination, but it doesn't seem like a huge stretch of the imagination to target the 4th most frequent high speed rail crossroads, which is exactly what they did.

nine_k 2y ago

I'd say that it's "easy" with regard of the resources on the spot. No hundreds of brain-washed fanatics. No tons of explosives. No extensive concealed digging or something similar. No desperate suicide attacks or hot chases or anything else highly visible. Apparently no bucketloads of cash. It looks more like an elaborately prepared barbecue party: careful planning, getting all the details figured out ahead of time, coordination and, well, relatively calm execution.

tjansen 2y ago

I think it’s easy in the sense that it was only a single day attack of probably not more than a few people. What would happen if 50 foreign agents would do this every day over the course of months or years?

bilbo0s 2y ago
This required a lot more than 50. There was a lot of planning and execution on this. Maybe foreign agents could do it with 50? If they were supported by satellites and other tools to which these attackers likely did not have access. But foreign agents are operating in relatively large teams even for simple missions. I don't think with this level of coordination, and this number of targets, spread over this large a geographic area, any intelligence agency is going to send one guy/gal per target. It only works like that in Bourne and 007 movies.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago

You are seriously understimating how easy it is to burn an electrical substation. It is actually a frequent occurrence in France (as seen on TV these days..) and everywhere else. Almost as frequent as copper thefts. Close to where I live they famously left a silicon foundry powerless for a day (with the consequent astronomical bill to restart it) by setting fire to one specific bridge. The only novel thing here is coordination, but it doesn't seem like a huge stretch of the imagination to target the 4th most frequent high speed rail crossroads, which is exactly what they did.