The lead-sheathed telegraph cable appeared to weigh tons, according to Lieutenant Cameron Winslow of the US Navy, and the weather was not helping his attempts to lift it from the seabed and cut it.
“The turbulent water hit the heavy ships, breaking them and almost crushing them on their planks.”
Eventually, Winslow’s men managed to cut the cable with hacksaws and disrupt enemy communications by cutting a 150-foot (46-meter) section.
This was in 1898 off the coast of Cuba during the Spanish-American War. More than a century later, undersea communications cables remain a target in times of geopolitical tension.
On November 17 and 18 of this year, two submarine fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged in an act that, according to German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, was probably sabotage. Swedish police have said that a Chinese cargo ship, Yi Peng 3, which was in the area of the cables when they were cut, is “of interest.”
The geopolitical backdrop to the current threat against undersea cables is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China’s behavior towards Taiwan and the war between Israel and Gaza, but they have long been an obvious target.
The cables, as thick as a garden hose when placed in deep water, carry 99% of international telecommunications traffic for personal, commercial and government use, with 530 undersea cable systems in service worldwide, spanning over 850,000 miles.
a typical world map of submarine cables It is a stark visual representation of the world’s connectivity and its vulnerability to disruption. These cables facilitate trillions of dollars worth of financial transactions a day, transport sensitive government communications, make voice calls, and transmit data over the Internet.
Dr. Sidharth Kaushal, senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank, says undersea cables are vital to the global economy and are therefore of clear interest to any state that wants to cause issues.
“If you look at the amount of global data passing through these cables, the ramifications of the damage sustained are quite significant,” he says.
However, given the large number of cables around the world’s seabed, a truly damaging attack would require sustained and very public action. An advantage of one-off attacks like the Baltic Sea incident is their deniability plausibility, says Dr. Kaushal. However, he says, the economic threat behind an attack means they can still send a “powerful diplomatic signal.”
The West was implicated in wiretapping for surveillance purposes after documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that major telecommunications companies had given British spy agency GCHQ access to undersea cables.
Recorded Future, an American cybersecurity company, said in a report last year that Russia was closely monitoring undersea cable systems.
“Russia, eager to inflict damage on the West for its support of Ukraine, has demonstrated increased intent to map the undersea cable system, most likely for potential sabotage or disruption.”
In 2015, the New York Times reported that Russian submarines and spy ships operated “aggressively” near undersea cables from the North Sea to northeast Asia.
However, it is not only Russia that is suspected.
A report from Taiwan’s national audit office this year said foreign ships had damaged cables linking the country to its outer islands 36 times since 2019, with 12 incidents recorded last year. Damage was caused by a variety of vessels, including fishing boats, cargo ships and sand dredgers.
In February last year, two cables linking Taiwan to the outlying Matsu Islands were damaged within days of each other by a Chinese fishing boat and cargo ship, resulting in slower internet connections and dropped phone calls, in what which one analyst described as a drill of an “invisible blockade” from Taiwan.
This year, Houthi rebels in Yemen denied attacking cables in the Red Sea after lines belonging to four major telecommunications networks were damaged.
According to Recorded Future, more than 100 undersea cable failures occur each year, defined as incidents in which cables are damaged or cut completely, disrupting their ability to transmit data. Most damage is accidental, often caused by trawls or ships dragging their anchors or, in one case in 2022, by a volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga.
Howard Kidorf, managing partner at Pioneer Consulting, which advises companies on undersea cable networks, says steel-wrapped lines can be cut “somewhat easily” if rogue actors want to cause disruptions.
“To deliberately cut a cable, most evil actors would use the same means as an accidental break: an anchor or other hook at the end of a rope or chain,” he says.
Until the late 1950s, shark bites were also a problem for telegraph cables, although no such attacks have occurred in recent decades. according to the International Cable Protection Committeewhich says that most cable failures since 1959 have been caused by fishing and anchors.
Repairs can be expensive and time-consuming. An undersea cable costs about $40,000 per mile and a new transatlantic cable would cost between $200 million and $250 million, according to Dgtl Infra research group. The transatlantic cables reach around 4,000 meters at their deepest point.
Recorded Future has also noted that Chinese state entities or affiliates have sought greater involvement in the global undersea cable network, which it claims is “almost certainly increasing China’s ability to manipulate, monitor and interfere with data flows.” worldwide”.
It is now a question of how much disruption state actors can or wish to cause.