Undersea cable network protected by numbers – for now
▶ Red Sea attacks raise concerns that sabotage to fibre-optic network could devastate global economy
Safety in numbers makes the world’s undersea cable infrastructure resilient against hostile attacks, an industry expert told The National.
For while an individual cable is “really vulnerable”, the collective strength in the 1.4 million kilometres of communications lines that criss-cross the world’s oceans should protect it against hostile acts, said Tim Stronge at TeleGeography, a company that monitors undersea cable infrastructure, based in Washington.
This resilience was demonstrated this month when four out of the 15 undersea cables in the Red Sea that carry data between Asia, the Arabian Gulf and Europe were severed near Yemen.
Some observers viewed it as a new phase of attacks by Houthi rebels on shipping crossing the Bab Al Mandeb strait.
In anticipation of cables being damaged, “the industry has responded by building a lot of redundancy into the system”, Mr Stronge said.
“If one cable goes down, many more stand by to back it up, and there are dozens of vessels stationed around the world capable of cable repair,” he said.
“Cables break all the time, in the order of two cable faults somewhere in the world each week, with the large majority of faults caused by accident – fishing nets dragging the seabed and anchors pulling on cables.” While Mr Stronge said this problem was “nothing new”, he warned against complacency in the face of threats to the cable network from state and nonstate entities.
A tiny proportion of damage to cables is also caused by natural factors, which can have a huge effect on local populations.
The eruption of an undersea volcano in the Pacific two years ago severed the only cable that linked the island nation of Tonga to the internet.
Until it was repaired a month later, Tonga’s 110,000 people were isolated from the global financial system.
“Our 21st-century economies would not exist as we know them without fibre-optic networks,” Mr Stronge said.
“No one in Tonga could withdraw cash as ATMs could not communicate with banks.”
To ensure the survival of their species, sea turtles lay up to 100 eggs at a time. Some will be dug up by scavengers and others will be eaten by predators shortly after hatching. But some will make it to the sea.
This safety-in-numbers approach is now being adopted by undersea cable companies. The cables are damaged relatively often and repairing them is a time-consuming, difficult and expensive process.
Tim Stronge, of cable monitoring company TeleGeography, believes the key to cable security is “more cables in geographically diverse locations”.
When four out of the 15 undersea cables in the Red Sea that carry data between Asia, the Gulf and Europe were severed recently, some saw it as a new phase of a campaign by Yemen’s Houthi rebels to attack commercial ships crossing the Bab Al Mandeb strait.
But this was only partially true. According to the US government, the cables were cut by the anchor of the Rubymar, a cargo vessel that sank after a Houthi attack last month, as the anchor dragged along the seabed.
Although many were relieved that the cables were not sabotaged, the incident cast light on the vulnerability of the network.
TeleGeography estimates that there are 574 cables traversing the world’s seas, measuring 1.4 million kilometres, with new lines regularly placed to replace obsolete ones. The cables, about as thick as a garden hose, are made up of optical glass fibres surrounded by layers of insulation and protection. Sections closer to shore are reinforced, often with steel.
At one end of the cable, data is converted into pulses of light, which are fired along the fibre-optic tube by lasers to be received and decoded at the other end.
Mr Stronge told The National that 21st-century economies “would not exist as we know them without fibre-optic networks”.
“Intra-corporate networks run on these cables, so their sudden absence would mean severe supply chain disruption. The world’s financial networks, including government central bank transfers, rely heavily on these cables as well.”
It is no coincidence that the map of the cable network looks very similar to a map of the global trade routes. And like global trade, the cables run through various bottlenecks, including the Red Sea.
It is at these points that the cables can come under threat, Nick Loxton, of security company Geollect, told The National. “Choke points like the Red
Sea equal a greater concentration of traffic in a narrow, shallow strait, which in turn equals a higher probability of accidental damage,” he said.
“Added to this, the relatively unstable location of many of these choke points makes the targeting of subsea cables and pipelines a more alluring high-impact, low-cost, asymmetric operation.”
The cable network carries at least 97 per cent of global internet traffic, with transactions worth more than $10 trillion flowing through them daily.
Most of the network is run by private companies, and Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among the significant investors.
Over the next few years, large internet companies are projected to invest $3.9 billion in the cable system.
But the network is vulnerable to natural phenomena, maritime accidents and sabotage.
The UK-based Policy Exchange think tank called the cable system a “critical asset and a valuable target” amid growing geopolitical tension.
Experts believe Russia has submarines off Ireland to test Nato’s defences, and that they may be able to sever undersea cables.
“They are too vast to defend, covering millions of kilometres, and attacks are difficult to attribute,” said Sean Monaghan, fellow at the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
Bruce Jones, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said there were several ways the cables could be damaged.
“In the Baltic Sea, we saw a ship dragging its anchor – we don’t for sure know whether by design or accident – was sufficient to rupture an important cable,” he told The National.
“Shark bites, believe it or not, have damaged them.
“But a major attack – severing several cables at once to create major disruption – would be handled by special purposes submarines, in which Russia has cutting edge capabilities.”
Most often, the cables are damaged by accident, usually involving fishing vessels.
“Cables break all the time,” Mr Stronge said.
“The large majority of faults are caused by accident – fishing nets dragging the seabed and ship anchors pulling on cables.
“The good news is that this problem is nothing new. The undersea cable industry has responded by building a lot of redundancy into the system – if one cable goes down, many more stand by to back it up, and there are dozens of vessels stationed around the world capable of cable repair.”
Building redundancy into a network is a numbers game. But laying new cables can take more than a year to complete, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
And once a cable has been laid, Mr Jones said, it is almost impossible and “extraordinarily costly” to pull it up and upgrade its security
While much of the network is in private hands, state governments are generally responsible for protecting them from threats.
In December last year, the British, Finnish and Estonian
militaries conducted subsea infrastructure protection drills in the Baltic Sea after a gas pipeline and three cables were damaged by a container ship’s anchor in October, in what Mr Jones called “a useful wakeup call”.
“A 10-nation coalition has been put together to do critical infrastructure protection in the Baltic Sea, but that’s the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
While some experts say governments need to increase efforts to protect the network, others insist its global nature keeps it safe, as any act of sabotage would cause disruption for the attacker.
But Mr Monaghan believes it depends on the players involved. “China is more intertwined in the global economy and less likely to target services that would also harm its own growth,” he said.
“Russia has not been deterred from doing so. By shutting itself off from the global economy and internet, it is experimenting with a ‘de-globalised’ strategy – although so far it is not exactly thriving.”
Experts believe Russia has submarines off Ireland to test Nato’s defences, and that they may be able to cut cables