UNLOCKED, NO GUARDS
Hut in a caravan park is all that protects Britain’s £30bn internet link to the USA from sabotage
A VITAL transatlantic internet cable worth £30 billion a year to Britain’s economy is housed in an unguarded shed – making it an easy target for terrorists or saboteurs.
An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has exposed alarming security flaws that leaves the fibre-optic cable vulnerable to attack. It forms the backbone of the UK’s internet services and serves major banks and financial firms.
Many crucial infrastructure sites such as nuclear power stations and military bases are guarded around the clock by armed police, yet the building that houses the £230 million Hibernia Express at the spot where it comes ashore in Britain doesn’t even have a permanent security guard.
Last week, a Mail on Sunday reporter ambled through an open gate and was able to look inside the station unchallenged. A terrorist or foreign agent would have been free to plant explosives or force their way inside. Twelve years ago, police reportedly foiled an Al Qaeda plot to destroy a key internet hub in London.
Another Mail on Sunday reporter found that defences at the landing station on the other side of the Atlantic – in Nova Scotia, Canada – were equally weak.
Former Security Minister Lord West last night described the discovery as ‘extremely worrying’, and Bob Fonow, a US telecoms industry expert, accused the British and US governments of ‘dangerous complacency’.
The Hibernia Express, which runs for more than 2,800 miles along the Atlantic seabed, provides Britain’s fastest internet connection to the US and Canada.
Data is fired from London to New York and back again in 58.55 milliseconds, more than five times quicker than the blink of an eye. It is part of a global network of 200 undersea cables, each the width of a garden hose, which transmits 97 per cent of global internet traffic and telephone calls.
Nine major cables connect the UK with the US and Canada, but the Hibernia Express carves a much straighter route and its extraordinary speed – six milliseconds faster than its nearest rival – makes it crucial for investment banks and hedge funds engaged in high-frequency trading.
Traders nicknamed ‘flash boys’ use supercomputers capable of placing millions of orders each day, and gain an advantage by moving trades milliseconds before their rivals. Industry insiders say a reduction in speed of just one millisecond can be worth up to £77 million a year, which explains why firms reportedly pay £ 3 million a year for access to the cable.
Search engines, telecoms providers and entertainment and media companies pay for access to lower speeds on the cable, which is owned by telecoms provider GTT Communications. Microsoft is a client and Google, Apple and Facebook are also understood to use it.
Hirander Misra, chief executive of Gmex Group, a financial technology company, estimated that the commercial advantage provided by the astonishing speed of the Hibernia Express could be the equivalent to a 3.1 per cent boost to the UK’s GDP over two years – or £33 billion a year.
Despite its critical importance, Hibernia Express’s landing station in England sits behind caravans and a funfair rollercoaster in a windswept corner of a popular coastal resort.
The building, roughly the size of a small bungalow, stands at one end of a car park used to store about 20 caravans.
During the summer, the car park is the venue for weekend markets and carboot sales. Holidaymakers buying souvenirs and brica-brac would be oblivious to being only yards from such a vital piece of the nation’s infrastructure. Located on a raised concrete platform to protect it from flooding, the one-storey building has a 9ft-high metal fence around it, but no barbed wire to prevent an intruder clambering over.
A slide gate built into the fence had been left open last Wednesday, allowing our reporter and a photographer to enter the compound and stroll around next to the building.
At the rear, a door had been left open by a group of engineers working inside. They were startled when the reporter peered inside and introduced himself. One of the men, who described himself as the ‘senior facilities manager’, said: ‘I can’t say anything to you – we need to go through our media team.’
Asked about the protection of the site, he replied: ‘We are very careful what we say it [the building] actually is. Our best way of security is if people don’t know it’s here.’
The site is not normally manned and does not have guards. Instead, it relies on a network of security cameras to spot potential attackers and alert a remote control room.
However, our reporter and photographer spent 30 minutes close to the site without challenge before talking to the engineers.
Remarkably, architect’s plans for the landing station are available on the local council’s website. The Mail on Sunday has chosen not to identify the location of the station, but the blueprints give details of its power supply, back-up generators and buried fuel tanks.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, green electric gates guard the entrance road to the landing station, but these were open when our reporter visited. Beside the gate is a security camera, but the reporter and a photographer were free to stroll 400 yards along a snow-lined road to the facility and spend 20 minutes taking photographs and examining the site without being challenged.
Lord West said: ‘ We are very worried about the Russians playing around with underwater cables of ours, including this one. But if where i t comes ashore i s not protected at all, then you don’t actually need to go to all the effort of getting down underwater. You can damage it without doing that. I find that extremely worrying.’
Mr Fonow, who carried out a review of the security around Britain’s cable infrastructure in 2005, said the GTT site did not appear to be secure and that bankers and traders ‘will not be happy’.
‘With all the information available about poor physical security of the internet and the complete dependency of modern societies on this infrastructure for survival, it is clear that governments aren’t taking the security of the infrastructure seriously,’ he said.
Last night, a spokesman for GTT said that the cable landing stations ‘have security built into their core and resilience measures in place that mean any interruption of service would not materially impact internet traffic’.