NASHVILLE – Four days after the Christmas Day bombing in downtown Nashville, mobile service was paralyzed, and even the key law enforcement team in a multi-state region, the citizens of White County, Tennessee, they were still struggling to get to the county emergency communications center. Training
Although the center’s landlines were working and officials issued a non-urgent number via social media, Suzi Haston, emergency manager for Rural Tennessee County in Tennessee, said she was still surprised her cell phone was still out of service after the attack breached an AT&T building more than 90 miles away.
Further afield, in Alabama, the bombing forced first responders to use two-way radio and texting systems after the state’s main communications network for public protection workers, FirstNet, was cut off.
The vulnerability of the telecommunications formula in Tennessee and the Southeast has become transparent on Christmas Day. Now, federal, state and local officials are beginning to ask for answers from AT&T, asking how a telecommunications nightmare happened and how it won’t happen again.
The AT building
It has affected 911 call centers, hospitals, the Nashville airport, government offices and individual cell phone users. Patients can simply touch pharmacies, credit card device disorders crippled businesses large and small.
Similar services and knowledge centers exist in cities across the country. Some, like the one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, are within key government building blocks.
As word of the bombing spread, officials in Mississippi searched for primary communications systems, rushing to keep critical state infrastructure sites, like ports, safe. along the Gulf Coast and oil and fuel refineries. The New York Police Department has even increased security at the city’s communications facilities.
Read more: The Nashville bombing exposed the ‘Achilles heel’ in the communications network
The Nashville bombing raises questions about potential vulnerabilities in the United States, said Colin Clarke, principal investigator at the Soufan Center. Beyond the giant public services, how does the country protect those “pedestrian places” that fewer people know exist?
“You would walk past this position on the street. ” You had to know it was there if you wanted to target it. So there’s no need for great security, ”said Clarke, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in addition to his role at the New York-based nonpartisan strategy center. But now we’re starting to rethink that Array . . . How can you give comfortable goals a boost and make sure it doesn’t take a stand again? “
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said they were working with partners in the region to assess what had happened.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who visited the crime scene a day after the blast, said his management had had several conversations with AT&T since the attack.
Lee said he expects AT&T to “strengthen this infrastructure” over the next month.
“Every time you have something like that, you can take a look at the consequences and see where your weaknesses were,” he said. “There is much to learn. “
US Senator Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who will serve as the lead Republican on the new Congressional Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, said the attack underscored “the importance of infrastructure security and its importance to our economy. and the protection of our communities. “
Meanwhile, U. S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, said she looked forward to working with her colleagues to push a bill that brought the nation’s communications infrastructure in 2020. She said her bill is aimed at “improving our national grid paints by making them more resilient, redundant and interconnected. “
“The Nashville bombing illustrates the danger posed by bad actors in disrupting telecommunications networks critical to the US economy,” Blackburn said. “Preventing potentially more serious long-term attacks on our people calls for deeper partnerships with the personal sector.
One of the legislators’ considerations is the effect of the explosion on emergency communications, adding disruptions to AT & T’s public protection network, which prioritizes traffic for first responders, FirstNet.
In 2012, following the recommendations made in the wake of September 11, Congress passed the law creating the First Response Network Authority (FirstNet), authorizing it to participate in a public-private partnership to build a secure broadband network. . nationwide.
In 2017, FirstNet awarded AT&T a 25-year, $ 6. 5 billion contract to build and build the National Network for Public Safety, according to a report through the Congressional Research Service.
In April 2019, FirstNet reported to Congress that more than 7,000 public protection agencies were on the network, and Verizon has a similar program that competes for contracts across the country.
But communities in the southeast experienced FirstNet outages after the Nashville, Tennessee and Alabama bombings.
Experts on the possible danger of such an incident.
“Cellular networks tend to give way precisely when they are most needed after a disaster,” wrote Johnathan Tal, CEO of Tal Global, a foreign security consultancy, in research published in 2018 in the industry publication SecurityInfoWatch. com . “These occasions are related to the greater vulnerability of this same infrastructure due to the increasing interconnectivity and complexity.
Even a fortuitous interruption, he said, can “lead to a colossal interruption in life and commerce. “
“Of course, network designers and security experts are aware of those vulnerabilities and have developed mechanisms and procedures to engage and reduce physical and cyber interference with elegant operations, but the scenario is safe,” Array Tal wrote at the time. .
In 2017, Congress raised questions about FirstNet and the reliability and redundancy of the network.
At the time, Chris Sambar, AT & T’s senior vice president, stated that the company needed a “public safety net spanning telephones to the central office,” but given current resources, it is “unreasonable to think that each and every shifts will. ” be on the point of public protection, ”according to Mission Critical, an industry publication.
A year later, in 2018, all 50 states and six U. S. territories agreed to FirstNet / AT & T’s plan to roll out the network in their state, though some did so reluctantly, according to the Congressional Research Service report.
On the Monday following the Nashville bombing, AT&T reported that most had been restored through a combination of fixes, adding generator maintenance and a transient network installed at Nissan Stadium near the headquarters.
Jim Greer, AT & T’s assistant vice president of corporate communications, declined to comment on the company’s security procedures after the attack. He cited CEO Jeff McElfresh’s emphasis in a Dec. 29 letter to consumers on protection first.
“Our buildings have been damaged, but our determination to serve you and to serve our network has been deterred. I am committed to continuing to operate 24 hours a day until service is restored. And we will continue to prioritize protecting all of our amenities that serve consumers across the country, ”said McElfresh.
On FirstNet, Greer said Thursday that emergency services at the scene of the attack had to go to FirstNet and that the service “remained in position for hours. “
More: Nashville police were warned in August 2019 that Anthony Warner ‘is capable of building a bomb’, documents say
Only after the loss of strength from the explosion and damage to the stack and water backup turbines were FirstNet consumers affected, he said.
“Within hours, FirstNet’s compromised portable mobile sites were on the air in Nashville. Despite the magnitude of the event, our team restored almost everything in approximately 48 hours, ”Greet said in an email. “The skill and delight of our groups has been a key difference in the response and restoration of service. “
What happened on Christmas Day illustrates the interdependence of the nation’s critical infrastructure, from communications to electric power to herbal gas, said Tim Conway, a commercial systems security specialist at the SANS Institute.
“Our kind of critical infrastructure supports each other like dominoes,” said Conway, who in the past oversaw the generation of operations for an herbal fuel and corporate force in northern Indiana.
“The quality of control and maintenance of this environment will prevent it from spreading to multiple states and destroying a global network,” Conway said. “So having an effect on what they had, being the type of where it was contained, is a sign of how well structured their network was and how well prepared they were.
James Yacone, project leader at the SANS Institute and former FBI Deputy Director for Critical Incident Response, is critical of AT & T’s response.
When the incident reached a ‘crossover’ point, affecting the force at a telecommunications node, Yacone praised AT&T for the quick response.
“I can tell you that after 30 years of responding to critical incidents, sometimes they don’t have compatibility in a large silo, so we see two critical infrastructures affected here, really, depending on how they got in. Cascade, ”he says. . “Are there other vulnerabilities like this one?” Absolutely, there is Array . . . But I think AT&T responded and took it quite temporarily given the cascading effect of what they were dealing with.
However, many were concerned about service outages.
White County, Tennessee, does not use AT&T for its landline service, which has allowed the 911 communications center to still accept some calls while wireless service is idle.
White County hopes Tennessee will address the impact, demand responses, and improve the state’s emergency communications systems.
“Hopefully AT&T can know what (was) the problem,” Haston said. She and other 911 managers in the Cumberland, Tennessee domain have had a daily convention call since the attack, but have not gotten “satisfactory responses from AT&T. “
The Tennessee Board of Emergency Communications has called a special assembly in the wake of the attack, and Haston said she and administrators plan to “see what our voices can do. “
Communications with White County were restored Wednesday after the bombing, and Haston said he believed there was no shortage of wireless emergency calls.
Haston doesn’t believe dispatchers missed a serious emergency when the lines were down. But, he said, there is no way of knowing.
Contribution: Natalie Allison, Yihyun Jeong and Yue Stella Yu of Tennessean in Nashville, Brad Harper of Advertiser and Justin Vicory of Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. Meghan Mangrum reports for Nashville Tennessean; Donovan Slack for USA TODAY.
Learn about the Nashville bombing:
A tip, a hat and a pair of gloves led to the identity of Nashville bomber Anthony Quinn Warner
Man known as a Christmas Day terrorist, longtime Nashville resident with electronics background
Images from the police camera revealed moments of chaos before and after the explosion