This story probably did not get a lot of press, but when an attack of such, cutting the cables occurred, the town of Morgan Hill, California has an emergency situation at hand, immediately. What was left functioning were stand-alone radio systems and not much else. Cell phones were dead.
The regional ham radio club was contacted and brought to the community hospital where they dispatched ambulances and doctors and handled all the emergency situations with phones that were still working. The fact that the local hospital’s network stopped working is scary in itself. 
The big saving grace here were the volunteers who arrived on their own time, with their own equipment. The manholes, of course are not under lock and key, thus it was easy enough for the attackers to cut the cables. The community survived with little issues after everything was repaired, but what this story should bring to light for all of us is the importance of emergency back up plans. Anyone too who needed cash from the bank was out of luck for the ATM machines. BD
Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported.
That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its centralization. The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities.
In addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a "paper system" for the day.
A Cyber-Attack On An American City
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