When people think about fiber optic cables, its usually about how they're used for telecommunications and accessing the internet. But fiber optic cables ' strands of glass or plastic that allow for the transmission of light ' can be used for another purpose: imaging the ground beneath our feet. MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) PhD student Hilary Chang recently used the MIT fiber optic cable network to successfully image the ground underneath campus using a method known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). By using existing infrastructure, DAS can be an efficient and effective way to understand ground composition, a critical component for assessing the seismic hazard of areas, or how at risk they are from earthquake damage. 'We were able to extract very nice, coherent waves from the surroundings, and then use that to get some information about the subsurface,' says Chang, the lead author of a recent paper describing her work that was co-authored with EAPS Principal Research Scientist Nori Nakata....

Cyberattacks linked to the Chinese government that compromised large portions of the American telecommunications network have the U.S. government sounding the alarm. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), has called it the 'worst telecom hack in our nation's history' and noted that it makes prior cyberattacks by Russian operatives look like 'child's play' by comparison. The complex cyberattack, carried out by a group of Chinese hackers dubbed Salt Typhoon, began as far back as 2022. Its purpose, according to U.S. officials, was to give Chinese operatives persistent access to telecommunications networks across the U.S. by compromising devices like routers and switches run by companies like AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others. This attack comes on the heels of reports that the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were assisting telephone companies with countering other China-connected compromises of their networks. The earlier hacking was part of an attack targeting people in the Washington area in government or political roles, including candidates for the 2024 presidential election....