Undersea cables are the backbone of global digital networks. We expect them to work but do we have a backup plan for when they fail?
All of us today are concerned by the news that a software update gone awry was responsible for the interruption of computer communications around the world. The update was intended to enhance computer security systems, but it had an unexpected result. It made it abundantly clear how vulnerable human society has become to any interruption in the digital communications systems we depend on, many of which are dependent on undersea cables.
“We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe and the United States and Asia,” Katarzyna Zysk, a professor of international relations and contemporary history at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, told. “This is a network that is extremely hard to surveil, to monitor, and to protect. This is infrastructure that is highly vulnerable to sabotage.
The incident could have been an accident. However, when the cables had been laid in 2004, Space Norway had taken the precaution of burying them beneath the seafloor in shallow areas where there was a risk of damage by fishing trawlers. Cutting the cables, in other words, meant first digging through 6 feet of protective mud.
To Katarzyna Zysk, the slicing of the marine institute’s cable and the damage to the Svalbard cable bear the hallmarks of Russian intelligence operations. She hypothesizes they could have been relatively simple — and deniable — ways to weaken parts of Norway and NATO’s intelligence gathering infrastructure, while perhaps serving as training exercises for Russian operatives specializing in sabotage of undersea cables.
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