Interesting article, but it feels like they dropped the ball by not having any mention at all of what people attacking this infrastructure are being charged with (and what penalties are being proposed, if they’ve said anything but “be harsher”).

It absolutely is critical infrastructure that warrants significant criminal charges, but if the police don’t have any evidence to start from and there’s no mention of actual penalties involved now, it’s hard to see what a reasonable path forward would be.

I feel something is off. I understand that it is an act of vandalism, but those providers are asking for a special treatment for their equipment with higher penalties. Isn’t better to just raise the current penalty? Or a new law target not just fibers but “critical infrastructures” which needs to satisfy a set of requirements or criteria?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The group, led by Ogi and Vorboss, has written to Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Michelle Donelan asking for a review of the rules that safeguard networks kit.

This follows recent spate of attacks on optical fiber network infrastructure around the country which represent an emerging threat to public services and businesses, the group says.

Jones told The Register that attacks range from simply chopping through fiber-optic cables in an underground duct, to lifting the cover of an access chamber, pouring in petrol, and setting the whole lot alight.

The motives for these attacks are thought to be simply vandalism or people with a grudge against a particular provider, rather than being a case of network operators aiming to sabotage their rivals, Jones claimed.

Ogi, which operates mostly in Wales, suffered an attack on its infrastructure in January in the Pembroke Dock area after which engineers had to effectively rebuild parts of a newly installed network covering 600m (nearly 2,000 feet) across several sites in the town, according to ISP Review.

"As the largest network in the UK with the highest regulated service standards to uphold, nobody suffers more from poor ‘whereabouts’ compliance than Openreach and no-one’s keener to improve it.

The original article contains 850 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Private companies wants state to foot the bill of improving their opsec.