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Network Technology

How the World's Vital Undersea Data Cables Are Being Targeted (theguardian.com) 145

Damage to two undersea fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea this month points to growing vulnerability of critical submarine infrastructure, with German officials suspecting sabotage and Swedish police investigating a Chinese cargo vessel's involvement.

The incident highlights escalating risks to the global submarine cable network, which carries 99% of international telecommunications traffic through 530 cable systems spanning 850,000 miles. These garden hose-thick cables facilitate trillions in daily financial transactions and vital government communications.

Security experts warn that Russia has increased monitoring of undersea cables amid tensions over Ukraine. Taiwan reported 36 cable damages by foreign vessels since 2019, while Houthi rebels denied targeting Red Sea cables this year. Though most of the 100-plus annual cable faults are accidental, deliberate sabotage remains a concern. Repairs are costly, with new transatlantic cables running up to $250 million.
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How the World's Vital Undersea Data Cables Are Being Targeted

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  • by bettodavis ( 1782302 ) on Friday November 22, 2024 @12:09PM (#64964949)
    Bad guys and pirates are roaming the seas and doing misdeeds again.

    Any country wanting to keep their way of life should be investing more in patrolling the seas and their particular interests.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      The Pax Americana is ending because America is forfeiting the field.

      • by jhoegl ( 638955 )
        Some are already experiencing it, but instability will soon be experienced by all.

        You want a stable world? Invest in making it stable. Relying on the USA to provide it was supposed to be a crutch until everyone was stabilized. Now... well, we have instability brought on by Israel, Russia, North Korea, and China because the USA got tired of dealing with it.

        No worries though, strongly worded letters are being sent as we speak from the EU.
      • Foreiting, being forfeitted, let's not quibble.
    • by Samare ( 2779329 )

      How long before the invasion of the Uns?

    • Remind me again - when was this "Pax Americana"?

      One of my friends - a journalist for the shipping industry - did a review of "Piracy in the 1990s just after the Millennium. (Yes, we knew - a year early, since there was no Year Zero CE/ BCE.) The gist of it was that annual insurance payouts in the 1990s for piracy averaged about £50 million, with insured deaths in the range 80~100 every year. It was one of the minor, but significant, drivers away from having expensive-to-insure Brits/ Commonweal

      • With 1,378,180 million in trade in 1990, that's practically zero. It's inconsequential. That was never a reason to move to lower costs. The reason to move to lower costs is - lower costs.

  • by echo123 ( 1266692 ) on Friday November 22, 2024 @12:15PM (#64964955)

    https://www.wired.com/1996/12/... [wired.com]

    Neal Stephenson
    The Big Story
    Dec 1, 1996 12:00 PM
    Mother Earth Mother Board
    The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.

  • Plan B? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Friday November 22, 2024 @12:19PM (#64964959) Homepage Journal
    Hmm...maybe it's time to start wide spread usage of Ham radios again...and have communications without wired internet?

    What are some other ways?

    • Re:Plan B? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday November 22, 2024 @12:33PM (#64964987)

      Hmm...maybe it's time to start widespread usage of Ham radios again...

      Radio doesn't have near the bandwidth of cables.

      The solution is redundancy, so if a few cables are cut, the others can take up the slack.

      Also segmenting, so a damaged section can be swapped without replacing hundreds of kilometers of cable.

      • Re: Plan B? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Magic5Ball ( 188725 ) on Friday November 22, 2024 @12:46PM (#64965019)

        What problem would a modular system solve in a better way than the current approach with cable splicing boats?

        https://www.wired.com/story/su... [wired.com]

      • by mysidia ( 191772 )

        The solution is redundancy, so if a few cables are cut, the others can take up the slack.

        It takes a LONG time to repair them and very short time to damage them, and bad actors can coordinate it so multiple cables are attacked at the same time. There are also only about 3 cable repair ships on the planet.

        The real solution might have been to bury the cables deeper beneath the sea floor and make their locations secret. Still would not do much good against ground-penetrating radar and undersea torpedos a

      • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

        If you can get all the way down to replace a segment i would think the same divers could do fusion splicing. You just need to evacuate a chamber long enough to do the work. Not unlike underwater welding. Again this depends on the depth.

  • FUCK RUSSIA (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by leptons ( 891340 )
    FUCK RUSSIA
    • FUCK RUSSIA

      What? All of them?! Can we just make it some of them & that'd be good enough?

      • by leptons ( 891340 )
        Fuck the entire mafia culture and everyone there that supports it. Russian society is just as disgusting as American society, but worse, they are way ahead of the US in allowing a dictator to fuck everyone. We'll see what happens the next 4 years, but Russia has been pretty shitty for 400+ years with no end in sight. Threatening nuclear war over Ukraine is really something. FUCK RUSSIA.
        • Do you really want to fuck the mafia goons?! Why not start with the more attractive Russians? There are 146 million of them to choose from, after all.
  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Friday November 22, 2024 @12:43PM (#64965011) Homepage

    The ship itself flies a Chinese flag. That makes China responsible, and it's time to play hardball.

    • Impound the ship and all of its cargo. Auction it all off.
    • Prosecute and imprison the ship's officers
    • Ban Chinese ships from European waters until China has paid the repair costs.
    • You realize the rest of the world subsidizes China's shipping costs? In the end we only fine ourselves.
    • The ship itself flies a Chinese flag. That makes China responsible, and it's time to play hardball.

      • Impound the ship and all of its cargo. Auction it all off.
      • Prosecute and imprison the ship's officers
      • Ban Chinese ships from European waters until China has paid the repair costs.

      You want the USA to take illegal, unilateral action against its 3rd largest trading partner?

    • Sure, if it is possible to prove that the ship was involved in cutting the cable. Merely being in the vicinity is not likely to be conclusive. They don't even know if the break was deliberate or accidental at present.

      The Finnish security intelligence service (Supo) said it was “too early to assess the cause of the cable damage”

    • Who decided their guilt? I must have missed that part.

      Man, you Americans are so gullible.

  • What if they'r eactually cutting out the NSA-placed splitters?

  • Sounds like the solution to the EU finding everything on the internet needs a big honking fine. They can send a boat out and do a vasectomy on the lines and no more rest of the world to be offended by.
  • Is there any reason to believe that this was deliberate and not the usual stupidity?

    I mean I had to deal with BIFFs regularly - Backhoe Induced Fiber Failures. I've also read about lines being severed accidentally when ships do something stupid, typically with their anchor. Apparently, ships have been stupid enough to drag their anchor for hundreds of miles in the past. As for it being Chinese - there's a lot of Chinese ships today, and perhaps there are "skill" issues.

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