Submarine cable security is all at sea, and UK govt 'too timid' to act, says report The first transatlantic cable, laid in 1858, delivered a little over 700 messages before promptly dying a few weeks later. 167 years on, the undersea cables connecting the UK to the outside world process £220 billion in daily financial transactions. Now, the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) …
1. How important does the UK think these cables are?
2. Are they Criticial National Infrastructure?
3. How on earth do you begin to think about securing these cables from external interference.
It seems to me, one of the biggest issues here is the grey zone operations that "accidentally" damage these cables, coupled with a lack of action from any nation state to hold the "accidental" perpetrators to account.
A bark and a bite is required here, but it requires some backbone to do so, or we're at continual risk from the information warfare that's mentioned in the article.
Just my 10 cents.
In peacetime difficulty of attribution is an issue, and it's expensive but not too difficult to repair cables. In wartime attribution isn't a problem, but fixing them would be a serious problem.
I think the challenge here is actually having the military assets to deter (or attack threats in a war scenario) and unfortunately, under successive governments both RN and RAF have been starved of funding and critical assets scrapped most notably Nimrod, but also under-arming RN vessels. The tiny number of Boeing P8s that the British government ordered can't possibly cover wartime anti-submarine duties, never mind offshore power cables and interconnectors, gas pipelines, and international data cables.
All very well for a parliamentary committee to wring its hands, but they are the very same people who have been complicit in the disarmament policies of former governments.
3. How on earth do you begin to think about securing these cables from external interference
someone help me here but didn't the register have an article years ago where they followed some huge important undersea cable to shore in what was essentially an unlocked shed or something
"3. How on earth do you begin to think about securing these cables from external interference."
Exactly, you may as well consider them gone in the event of a world war level conflict. No point protecting them from overt attack, may as well plan how to survive without. It's a dead cert the West has been developing technology to locate and destroy and so will our potential enemies. The cost of protecting will be astronomic and no western government will spend that on anything that doesn't provide votes.
If it's an overt major conflict you don't need them because shipping will be under attack too, so nothing non-essential will be moving. It'll only be the same goods as WW2 that move. Unfortunately, our government is doing its best to destroy farming (our only food supply in conflict) on behalf of Bill Gates & Larry Fink. It takes at least a year to re-energise it, probably longer if no fertiliser, seeds and cattle are in short supply.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/29/yi-peng-3-ship-submarine-cable-china-baltic-denmark-russia/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/16/undersea-submarine-cable-cut-grey-war-dark-fleet/
or same via yahoo
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/curious-case-chinese-cargo-ship-133924629.html
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/cat-mouse-war-against-undersea-170242643.html
"The real problem with brute-force physical damage from vessels is that it's difficult to prove that it's intentional."
If one unintentionally causes damage, one still has to pay up.
I think that if a ship unintentionally causes large damages to communication infrastructure, that is cause enough to bring it up and detain it.
Requiring all ships operating in international waters (countries can already make their own laws for their own waters) to have insurance to fully cover cable damage, and that it be documented with the vessel's name and other information in a central registry. Assuming technological means of determining and recording anchor dragging incidents (in particular, recording when engines are engaged with a dropped anchor) are practical and wouldn't be too costly, insurance companies would require that to obtain coverage. Then you can take diplomatic and if necessary military action against ships that don't have coverage if they're spending a suspicious amount of time over undersea cables.
I note that Danny writes: "you'll be pleased to hear that sharks don't generally munch on them".
Interestingly, this is true these days but previously it wasn't. Early undersea cables were copper, and the electrical signals flowing down them would generate magnetic fields that attracted sea-life, and big fishy things would often come and have a nibble. In these days of fibre-optics, there's no such effect and so no munching.
:-)
It was a miserable time to be an admin at an ISP I can tell you.
Was probably more miserable for the shark given the power feeding long cables is lots of kV DC. Also why attempting to bimble around landing stations without permission may seriously harm your health. The ones I've been in (with permission) often had lines that must not be crossed while the PFE (Power Feeding Equipment) was energised due to risk of arcing.
Well yeah, and probably the best for latency.
I remember many years ago, (some of) the links to New York from London went down for a while. I remember having a slightly slower connection, and 'traceroute' showing London -> France -> New York.
I don't know if that problem was due to the Bude link, and I'm a bit sketchy on the overall details, but yeah, there are plenty of backup routes in these cases!
EDIT: I just asked google-ai if it "remembered" this incident, and this was the response:
Based on archived news, your UK to New York internet traffic was likely routed through France during a major transatlantic submarine cable outage in November 2003. The failure involved the TAT-14 cable system, and due to a compounding issue, traffic had to be rerouted, causing significant disruption.The TAT-14 cable failure (November 2003)
The system: The TAT-14 was a transatlantic fiber-optic cable that connected the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United States. It was a key part of the internet infrastructure, having been implemented in 2001.
The double fault: For the TAT-14 system to fail so significantly, two separate faults had to have occurred at roughly the same time.
One fault occurred in the US sector of the cable earlier in the month.
A second fault occurred in the French sector, located between the Netherlands and France, a few weeks later.
Because the first fault had not been repaired when the second one happened, the system's built-in redundancy failed, and disruption became unavoidable.
The impact: British ISPs, including Telewest and NTL, reported problems. Some users experienced a large increase in latency and slower internet speeds, likely prompting the rerouting of traffic through alternate paths, such as the one via France that you experienced.
The repair: France Telecom, which was responsible for the French sector of the cable, sent a ship to repair the problem.
Why Paris was involved
In the normal course of business, a direct transatlantic cable is the fastest route for traffic. However, during the TAT-14 failure, the internet's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) would have identified the issue and sought the next best available pathway. In this scenario, Paris would have been a viable option due to its role as a major internet exchange point in Europe and its terrestrial connections to other operational submarine cables.
This event is a good illustration of how network resilience is built into the internet, with alternate routes automatically being used to keep traffic flowing even during a major infrastructure failure.
Russian tourists, well known for their appreciation of our historic treasures such as Salisbury Cathedral, while in the UK for absolutely no other reason whatsoever, could find themselves in Bude for the sole purpose of viewing and delighting in that well known British tourist site, the Bude Tunnel.
Concern should be expressed.
What's needed is ways to make it more difficult for foreign actors to actually damage operational cables and resilience to damage.
The former needs counter measures like buried cables, enhanced armour, sensors, possibly decoys and at some point, counter measures.
The latter needs many more connections to our closest neighbours, and working with them to make sure you can fail over between ours and their connections, so that it's incredibly difficult to cut everyone off.
It'd be handy if there's some sort of european-wide organisation that might be used as a way to cooperate on such matters
Undersea cables etc always will be vulnerable no matter how much money you chuck at armouring them or whatever. Only sensible approach seems to be regular inspection for planted devices and constant monitoring for suspicious activity. Then when something does happen we (hopefully) know who did it. And that's the problem. At the moment folk like Putin know they can do their mischief and leave people only suspecting, but not knowing, they did it. Which is exactly what Putin & co are wanting
The former needs counter measures like buried cables, enhanced armour, sensors, possibly decoys and at some point, counter measures.
Hmm. Mines exist that can basically launch torpedoes, so having those along a cable route could relieve the tedium of a long shift in the NOC. You sunk my battleship! Except we don't have battleships any more, much to my disappointment.
Rest is kinda already done, ie trenching and burying cables in high-risk areas, along with matting or even concrete where cables are inshore or in shallow water. Sensors already exist, ie OTDR built into SLTEs will detect a cut within a few seconds. Enhanced armor just isn't practical given cost & weight of the cable, and the basic physics of expecting it not to just snap when being dragged by a large ship. Which is more likely to happen where there's a lot of shipping, which is where cables tend to get cut anyway. Plus it's not easy when there's a lot of shipping traffic in a busy sea lane to identify anyone that might be up to no good.
So that pretty much leaves increased patrols, so a patrol vessel can go 'Hey! Did you know you're dragging your anchor?' which means more patrol vessels (battleships!) like corvettes that can trundle along cable routes, which gets expensive. Especially if you're also going to be watching out for submarines or submersibles, which is usually the job of more expensive frigates. Paying for those patrols can also be a fairly hefty chunk of a cable operators expenses already.
Sensing that a cable is cut is too late, it's surely possible to detect the dragging along the ocean floor before it's caught, presumably they need to trawl an area, cables that are placed nearby that detect mischief. Give at least some chance of scaring them off, one way or another. Maybe that's done already. If the first you hear of it is the signal going out, then it's a bit late.
Decoy cables is also presumably a sensible thing to do, while it's not incredibly difficult to find international cables, if there's a dozen others in the region, at least within the continental shelf, treated exactly the same but with slightly different routes, then it's a lot harder to find the right one to damage.
As for counter measures, well, that's probably more for a war scenario, but you could definitely envisage instead of torpedoes, drones that either attach trackers to or...defend against...nefarious operators.
Patrols are pretty unlikely to find much, big seas...
As a nerd. I visited Bude Beach and marvelled that the countries financial and Internet traffic was passing under my feet as I was there. The cable is literally just in the sand and there is manhole cover showing you exactly where it comes in.
It would be so trivial for someone nefarious to plonk a tent on the beach, dig down slightly and find the cable. It would then be trivial to chop it. In fact in the right conditions when the sand has been swept away the cable is unburied completely, you can Google to see pics of that. It should be dug as deep as they can get it in under the sand. Cannot understand why they don't do that.
There's also no security that I can see for a hugely important piece of national infrastructure round there. Although maybe the lifeguard station are told to keep an eye. I doubt in reality anyone would come running to question you.
When Cable TV first came to the area, the local ne'er-do-wells amused theselves by pouring petrol into the man holes, followed by a lighted match, so they could watch the cables being pulled to the surface and the pavement disintegrating around them.
It's not just the externally facing infrastructure that's surprisingly vulnerable. See also airports and drones, anti-5G mast saboteurs, lineside fires on the railways, etc. In the old days, you poisoned the local well and salted the fields.
Clearly some infrastructure is more critical than others but the possible attack surface is enormous.
"The first transatlantic cable, laid in 1858, delivered a little over 700 messages before promptly dying a few weeks later."
There is a history of transatlantic cables here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
It seems that there was a problem with the two cables created for the first one:
"The cable from the Gutta Percha Company was armoured separately by wire-rope manufacturers, the standard practice at the time. In the rush to proceed, only four months were allowed for the cable's completion. As no wire-rope maker had the capacity to make so much cable in such a short period, the task was shared by two English firms: Glass, Elliot & Co. of Greenwich and R.S. Newall and Company of Birkenhead. Late in manufacturing, it was discovered that the two batches had been made with strands twisted in opposite directions. This meant that they could not be directly spliced wire-to-wire, as the iron wire on both cables would unwind when it was put under tension during laying. The problem was solved by splicing through an improvised wooden bracket to hold the wires in place, but the mistake created negative publicity for the project."
The problem was solved by splicing through an improvised wooden bracket to hold the wires in place, but the mistake created negative publicity for the project."
There were also concerns that armor wires being wrapped widdershins might have awoken the Old Ones when it was energised. Allegedly. Also why there's a cable landing station close to Dunwich cos Cthulhu wanted cable. I doubt it would suprise people knowing that telcos make dark deals with $deitiies.
But I digress.
Another story I heard was during cable laying to the Caribbean. This was eagerly awaited by the islanders who'd lined up ashore, eagerly awaiting the arrival of either the ship or the cable. Can't remember if this was Brunel's SS Great Eastern or similar, but big steam ships were used to lay cable, on account of distance and needing huge cable tanks. But Captain decided to put on a bit of a show, put on speed, and promptly snapped the cable and got fired. Think that was something I saw at the excellent Porthcurno cable museum. One fun aspect is that some parts of cable laying and maintenance are relatively unchanged since those days, ie finding the ends of severed cables by sailing around with a grapnel & yoinking it up to the surface.
Some of this risk might be mitigated by lofting satellites that emulate terrestrial cables in that their traffic would be largely among satellites along an orbit, with up/down links to ground stations for subsequent distribution rather than serving individual terrestrial customers from space.
There would be several signal paths at higher altitude than the Starlink swarm. Members would communicate bidirectional traffic within their orbital train using lasers with TB/sec links. These would be largely redundant to marine cables, and should be harder to sabotage.
For satellites in a follow-the-leader orbit 1500 miles high, visibility distance between satellites is slightly over 4000 miles. Overpopulate the orbit such that inter satellite distance is ~1000 miles, and you'd have the data equivalent of a submarine cable in the sky. And I think it would be easier (certainly faster) to replace satellite nodes than to find & fix marine cable breaks.
Nice idea, but in practice would involve significant latency (variable), and frequent dropped or repeated packets as the sky cable reconfigures. At low altitude, the satellites would be whizzing every which way, meaning a mech that's constantly reconfiguring - hence latency that's constantly varying depending on the path taken, and lost or duplicate packets (or just delayed) each time the mesh reconverges. The only way to avoid that is using geostationary birds - but then you get the 2 seconds or so latency that used to be so much fun with transatlantic phone calls.
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