An employee enters the meet-me-room at a major carrier hotel in Los Angeles, New York, or Miami.  He is a young guy recently graduated from high school, hired to do cable removal for circuit disconnects at minimum wage.  Although young, he has a wife and child, and has recently been fighting with in-laws over his ability to support a family.  Frustration and anger overcome his emotions, and he turns to the ladder rack jammed with cable and starts hammering at the cables for all he is worth.

Network operations centers around the world see circuits dropping, and customers with critical financial, military, Internet, and broadcast news services are shut down.  In the space of about one minute our young employee has taken down several thousand individual circuits, creating near chaos in the global telecommunications community.

In their report on Trusted Access to Communications Infrastructure, the NSTAC Vulnerabilities Task Force advises ""it is important to recognize that any one individual with malicious intent accessing any critical telecommunications facility could represent a threat.   The threat of insiders performing malicious acts also transcends each type of site discussed in this document."