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2024-03-07 Cyber
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Which cable will NATO cut if it wants to disconnect Russia from the Internet?
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Leonid Savin
[REGNUM] The current confrontation between Yemen's Houthis and the Western coalition in the Red Sea has opened a new dimension to the conflict. It is reported that on Monday, March 4, three cables that lie at the bottom of the Red Sea were damaged. These were Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1), Europe India Gateway and Seacom-TGN-Gulf, according to Hong Kong-based HGC Global Communications.
The report said restrictions caused by the damage affected 25% of traffic passing through the Red Sea. The company described the Red Sea route as critical for data transfers from Asia to Europe and said it had begun rerouting traffic.
Seacom, in turn, said: "Initial testing indicates that the affected segment is within the maritime jurisdictions of Yemen in the southern Red Sea." The approximate depth at the site of cable damage is 200 meters.
Tata Communications, part of the Indian conglomerate that operates the Seacom-TGN-Gulf line, said it had "initiated immediate and appropriate remedial action" after the cable was cut.
The first suspicions fell on Yemen's Houthis, who are attacking sea vessels in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which they consider to belong to hostile states. It is significant that this was announced by the Western media, which touched on this problem earlier. Although even the New York Times did not make hasty introductions, calling the incident “mystical damage.”
It is believed that the cables may have been damaged as a result of the recent sinking of the British cargo ship Rubymar. On February 18, it became a target for Houthi forces and was abandoned by its crew.
After the attack, the ship was left adrift in the Red Sea for several days, dragging its anchor along the seabed, where it could cut one or more cables. There is no official confirmation of this yet. However, NetBlocks noticed internet outages in the East African country of Djibouti in late February.
Seacom noticed that data transmission had stopped on a line that runs from Mombasa in Kenya up the Red Sea to Zafarana in Egypt. At the same time, two cables connecting the west to the east were damaged.
There has been no confirmation from the Houthi Ansarallah movement itself. Moreover, they denied even the intention to sabotage international Internet communications. An official press release on Tuesday March 5 said the Houthi government was “committed to protecting all submarine telecommunications cables and related services from any possible risks” and also promised to provide funds for “cable repairs and maintenance.”
The Houthis blamed the damage on Britain and the United States, whose armed forces are conducting an operation against them.
Obviously, it is not possible to reasonably accuse any party due to the current lack of evidence. The fact that the incident occurred in a part controlled by Yemen, in accordance with international law, does not confirm the involvement of the Ansarallah movement. There are various opposition groups operating in Yemen, and in the northern part of the country there is even a “branch” of the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda.
WHERE DO THE CABLES GO?
Fiberglass optical cables running along the bottom of seas and oceans, connecting countries and regions, look almost like a garden hose. More than 90% of all Internet traffic between Europe and Asia passes through such cables.
And a study published by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2017 said that 97% of all intercontinental electronic communications were carried out using undersea fiber-optic cables that lie at the bottom of the world's oceans.
The same study provided a clear example of how important cables are in the Middle East. After three divers tried to deliberately cut an undersea cable near Alexandria in 2013, internet speeds in Egypt dropped by about 60%.
There are approximately 550 submarine cables worldwide. However, if we talk about breaks, then on average they occur from 100 to 150 per year. Therefore, what happened in the Red Sea is not something extraordinary. The Western media are simply exaggerating this problem, introducing a political element and hinting at the guilt of the Houthis. They also often speculate that Russia could do something similar off the coast of France and Britain.
By the way, in most cases, the cause of cable breaks is human activity, and not military activity, for example, a ship dragging an anchor or a fishing trawl. There are also natural disasters: underwater earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
And if a single cable breaks, this is compensated by the redundancy built into the global system by operators. Even if all the cables in the Red Sea were cut, internet traffic could be rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa or east through Singapore, Japan and the United States into Europe. Although this, of course, will affect speed and throughput.
But the Red Sea is of particular interest.
Back in November 2022, the specialized publication Wired noted that Egypt is the most vulnerable place in the submarine cable communications system.
Then journalists analyzed the recent rupture of the already mentioned AAE-1 cable (it connects Hong Kong with Marseille and provides Internet connectivity to more than ten countries), which led to a number of countries being disconnected from the Internet for several hours. Ethiopia lost 90% of its connectivity and Somalia lost 85%. Access to all Google, Amazon and Microsoft cloud servers has also disappeared.
Interestingly, that time the rupture occurred on land, not at sea, and the cause was never established.
In total, 17 cables pass through the Red Sea, and two of them should go into operation this year, and three more are planned to be put into operation only in 2025. All of them are connected into a relatively compact bundle in the area of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the exit from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
If you look at the global map of submarine cables, you can see several more places with an extreme concentration of Internet communications that pose a certain vulnerability. These are Hong Kong in China, the coasts of Japan, South Korea and Indonesia, as well as the southwestern coast of Britain. In the US, this is the New England region on the Atlantic coast, and on the Pacific coast there are hubs in California.
A global network of undersea cables forms a large part of the Internet's backbone, carrying much of the world's data and ultimately connecting to the networks that power cell towers and Wi-Fi connections.
In many cases, companies operating submarine cables have antennas and other equipment to connect to a backup satellite network. This helps restore communications within 15 minutes if the ground or underwater infrastructure is damaged for some reason.
Despite the possibility of prompt recovery, the recent failure had an increased effect, as it affected the work of a number of Western social networks and instant messengers.
RUSSIA'S WEAK SPOt
It is reasonable to ask: How closely is Russia connected to undersea internet highways, and are there vulnerabilities similar to those in the Red Sea? In general, there are few submarine cables in our jurisdiction relative to other countries and regions.
The state-owned Polar Express cable covers most of Russia, starting from Teriberka in the Murmansk region and running through all the northern and Far Eastern seas to Vladivostok.
It has the important function of transmitting traffic to Amderma, Dikson, Tiksi (these segments will start operating in 2025), Pevek, Petropalovsk-Kamchatsky, Anadyr, Nakhodka and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (coming in line by 2026). The Teriberka-Amderma section is currently operating.
In the Far East, communication with Kamchatka has been provided since 2016 by the Far Eastern Submarine Cable System and the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky-Anadyr cable, introduced in 2022.
In the Black Sea, a cable from Russia connects Sochi to Georgia, and from Georgia it runs along the seabed to Bulgaria. Since the Black Sea is now a conflict zone, this may also affect Internet communications.
The cable itself runs far from the Ukrainian borders, and even if the Ukrainians and their Western accomplices want to carry out sabotage, as they did with Nord Streams, then Georgia, not Russia, will suffer first.
In the Baltic Sea, starting from 2021, a Russian cable connects Kaliningrad and Kingisepp. There is also the BCS North-Phase 2 cable, which connects the Russian city of Kotka with Finland across the Baltic Sea. It belongs to the Swedish company Arelion, and the main traffic from Russia to Europe through Scandinavia goes through it.
Perhaps this is the most vulnerable place for Russia. And in light of the military-political confrontation with NATO, it is necessary to keep this in mind.
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05:14 NN2N1
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