TOAt the end of an unmarked path on a small island on the edge of Stockholm’s sprawling Baltic Sea archipelago sits a small, inconspicuous wooden cabin, painted a deep shade of red. The water gently laps the snow-covered rocks and the smell of pine fills the air.
The site offers few clues about the geopolitical drama that has gripped Scandinavia in recent months, fueled by accusations of infrastructure sabotage. But in fact, the cabin houses a key cog in Europe’s digital connectivity and a point of vulnerability in a potential hybrid war: a data center that amplifies the signal from a 1,615-mile fiber optic cable running from the north. from Sweden to Berlin.
Last month, two nearby fiber optic cables were cut, prompting an ongoing investigation by Swedish authorities. Western intelligence officials from several countries have said they are confident that a Chinese ship caused the clippings after setting sail from the Russian port of Ust-Luga, although opinions differ on whether the clippings were accidental or potentially deliberate.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sweden has seen an increase in hybrid warfare (attacks against an adversary using methods other than traditional military action) attributed to pro-Russian groups. With northern European governments on high alert over Russian hybrid activity, The Guardian was granted exclusive access to the Stockholm data center site.
Daniel Aldstam, chief security officer at GlobalConnect, which carries 50% of the Nordic countries’ internet capacity and runs the centre, described the focus of its location and its ordinary outward appearance as “security through obscurity”.
“There are essentially two different approaches,” he said. “Either you put a lot of fences around it that make it obvious that something is critical, or you do it like we’ve done here and try to keep things a little more discreet. But of course we have the normal stuff in terms of alarms, CCTV, access control and all that.” Inside, cages filled with equipment emit blinking lights and different colored cables line the ceiling.
After a recent alleged sabotage incident, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk proposed a “naval surveillance” initiative that would involve joint military patrols by countries around the Baltic.
Traveling from Stockholm by helicopter over the archipelago, made up of 30,000 islands, rocks and reefs, it becomes clear how difficult it is to protect the coast. But its vastness also suggests how the “security through obscurity” approach could be effective, at least to some extent. Maps showing where all the undersea cables are laid are publicly available.
“We have hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber. How do you protect him physically? “You can’t,” Aldstam said. “The important thing here is redundancy (using multiple cables that offer alternative routes if one is cut). “You need to have more fiber.”
With infrastructure considered particularly vulnerable to hybrid warfare, there are signs of adjustments to the “dark” approach, reflecting the difficult times.
GlobalConnect is in the process of establishing a larger, more modern-looking data center nearby, which while still unmarked and painted a similar shade of red, is more obviously a building that serves an important function. Inside it has its own diesel-powered backup generator to ensure it can keep running if the power goes out.
The vulnerability to sabotage of undersea cables and other critical infrastructure – particularly in the relatively shallow and crowded Baltic – has become a focus of attention since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In September 2022, the Nord Stream gas pipeline, transporting natural gas from Russia to Germany, exploded. Initially, many assumed Russia was to blame. However, in August this year, German media reported that German authorities had issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man on suspicion of being part of a team that planted explosive devices in the pipeline. Both sides in the war in Ukraine have denied responsibility and blamed each other for the attack.
NATO, which has established a center dedicated to undersea security, has warned that the safety of nearly a billion people in Europe and North America is at risk from hybrid warfare by the alliance’s adversaries, due to vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of wind farms, oil pipelines and electrical cables. Earlier this month, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte urged Europeans to “switch to a wartime mentality.”
Despite all the warnings, underwater cables, which can lie or be buried on the seabed, appear surprisingly light.
“We call it supermegacable, but it doesn’t sound or look like supermega,” said Patrik Gylesjö, responsible for overseeing the entire GlobalConnect cable project between Sweden and Berlin, which was completed earlier this year. “The name refers to its capacity rather than its size.”
Inside the cable, which is just over 2cm in diameter, is a small section made up of 96 pairs of hair-thick fibers, enough to support a billion simultaneous Netflix streams, he said. The rest is made up of steel reinforcement and a waterproofing substance.
It would only take the anchor of a relatively small ship to break the cable, Gylesjö said. “If you wanted to break this cable or cut it, you wouldn’t need a very big tool. “It’s quite fragile.”
Strengthening it, he added, would make it heavier, more expensive and “more complicated to implement.”
Accidental undersea cable breaks are incredibly rare. “In general, damage is very rare,” says Gylesjö. “Very strange. During our time as a marine cable operator, I think this has happened two or three times at most.”