Cable theft and tampering results in significant disruption and costs for railway networks.
The usual theft target is copper, securing a good price on the scrap market. Both opportunistic and organised gangs target railways as its infrastructure is often both vulnerable to access and hidden from public view.
Occasionally tampering with cables themselves may be the target for disgruntled groups aiming to disrupt traffic and gain attention for their cause. Low-skilled attacks on vital signalling and control networks can disrupt rail traffic for hours or even days.
Sensonic Distributed Acoustic Sensing detects both the presence of a person, (see trespass detection), and movements of the cables themselves such as accessing cable troughs, ducts and trays.
The real-time detection and geolocation of these cable events allows security teams to find threats fast with fiber.