Workers laying submarine cables in the Baltic Sea
From Ulstein Newspaper, Getty Images
on mondayAs the conflict continues in Yemen, three fiber optic cables have been damaged in the Red Sea, reducing internet bandwidth in the region and could take weeks or months to repair. The three cables carry about 25% of the region’s internet traffic, and carriers had to rely on other cables and satellites to avoid damage.The cause of the cable break was likely the cargo ship’s anchor. RubimarThe plane was hit by a missile in mid-February and its crew abandoned it, according to a CBS interview with White House National Security and Public Affairs Advisor John Kirby.
Although these cable cuts were unintentional, the incident highlights that undersea cables, which carry approximately 97% of the planet’s internet traffic, are particularly vulnerable to intentional interruptions. Did. “It’s alarmingly simple,” said Michael Dollar, a military researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. forbes. “In fact, it’s so simple that it’s often difficult to tell whether it was an accident or intentional.”
Darrah added that this fact will become more important as the world moves away from large-scale military operations and geopolitical rivals become more likely to target each other in more subtle ways. Cable damage incidents have occurred before, he said, and “we suspect they were intentional, but one of the reasons it’s such a difficult problem area is that it’s also vulnerable to accidents.” Stated. “This plays directly into the hands of adversaries who operate in a gray zone and do not want to be responsible for any attacks.”
But Tim Stonzi, vice president of research at analyst firm Telegeography, said such small-scale attacks don’t necessarily cause major disruption. He said there are about 100 accidents affecting undersea cables a year and “the industry is used to failure.” About two-thirds of these accidents are caused by human activity, such as cables getting caught in fishing nets or anchors being pulled up. The time it takes to repair damage varies depending on the location of the damage and jurisdiction, but typically takes at least a few days.
Almost all submarine cables are owned by private companies. Many of the older cables were built by consortia of telecommunications providers, or by companies that built the cables for the purpose of selling capacity to providers. Lately, Silicon Valley has also gotten into the game. TeleGeography estimates that Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon alone own or lease nearly half of the available undersea bandwidth.
Stonzi added that the industry primarily prepares for breaks by adding redundancy. For example, in the Red Sea he had three cables cut, but he still has 11 submarine cables in the region that can carry his internet traffic. TeleGeography estimates that approximately 574 submarine cables are currently in operation or planned. Therefore, unless it is an island nation, it is unthinkable for a country to be completely cut off from the internet, as was the case in Tonga in 2022 when an undersea volcanic eruption destroyed one of its submarine cables. That damage took about a month to repair.
Still, given the global economy’s dependence on internet access, governments are beginning to take further steps to secure undersea cables. NATO last year brought together industry and government stakeholders to provide more consistent security for cables and pipelines, launched a coordination center aimed at protecting undersea infrastructure, and launched a joint working group with the European Union. launched.
The main issue that needs to be addressed in the short term for protection is making it easier to identify specific vessels that may cause damage to the cables, Darrer said. Currently, carriers know when and where corruption occurs, but they don’t necessarily know the specific cause. Even if it is clear that an anchor caused the damage, it is not known which ship the anchor came from. This could lead to accidents such as the damage to two undersea cables cutting off internet connectivity to the Matsu archipelago off the coast of Taiwan in February 2023. Taiwan’s National Communications Commission was unable to provide any evidence that the Chinese ship was reportedly responsible for the damage, which took more than a month to repair.
He added that governments can increase infrastructure monitoring and use sensor information such as radar, satellite imagery, ship transponders and other data to directly determine who or what caused damage to undersea cables. If that happens, the veil of uncertainty could be lifted, he continued. Stonzi added that industry could also measure the surface pressure of cables, which could tell if there are ships in the sky.
“The main attraction of undersea infrastructure against deliberate attacks is the anonymity that comes with it,” Dollar said. “If you take away that anonymity, the target set becomes much less attractive.”
