Europe's Internet resilience mitigates impact of submarine cable cuts
blog.cloudflare.com153 points by hampus 7 months ago
153 points by hampus 7 months ago
One important question that I'm unclear on is how long it takes to fix one of these cables. If it takes months then that is quite a wide window in which an attacker could incrementally take down cables.
This is a great video on undersea cables https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFt9le2ytW0
"Sabatoge" and repair is discussed at 11:45
In this particular case, it seems like the attackers were trying for plausible deniability (making it look like an accident with an anchor). A comprehensive series of "accidents" wouldn't fit that goal.
(And if they decide they don't care about plausible deniability, they could use sub-deployed timed mines to take out every cable at once.)
Even if these "accidents" are a state sponsored (or at least condoned) action, it seems certain states have realized they can happen over and over again without consequences[0].
The frustrating part of this kind of petty tactic is that bullies can do just enough to annoy and inconvenience their targets, while never quite doing enough to make it worth expending the political capital to hold them to account. From the bully's perspective there's no downside. And if legitimate accidents or rogue actions get portrayed as deliberate then all the better - that just reinforces the bully's reputation as an actor to be feared while further eroding trust in the international institutions that may one day challenge it.
Wouldn’t the ship insurance company be responsible for the costs?
At some point insurers are going to increase their costs to these Chinese companies to the point that sabotage does not become viable anymore.
And then once they are fixed take them out again
> once they are fixed take them out again
In an actual war, you hit the repair equipment and personnel [1].
(As to the Geneva Conventions note, we're discussing a hypothetical war with Russia. The status quo, including rules of war, are going to be rewritten by the victors.)
If you are planting one cutting device (small bomb etc), you could do the same thing 10 miles down the line and blast it again without having to revisit the area.
They could even blow up all cables at once. Maybe the explosives have already been placed.
With timers ? because undersea communication is not as solved problem AFAIK
The communication does not have to be fast, so they could use extremely low frequency signals, which apparently can travel over hundreds to thousands of miles in seawater. On top of that, they could build a mesh network.
Generally it can be fixed in days. They raise it from the sea floor and splice in a new cable section.
True but ships and crews with the equipment to do the repairs are limited. It's possible to overwhelm the repair capacities. Also, it takes time to physically travel between cuts so while cuts in the Baltic might take a week or two to fix, a cut in the Atlantic and one in the Baltic may take a week or two just for travel.
If someone will try to overwhelm the repair capacities for integral communications, they'll be dealt with like pirates - simply sunk and be done with.
As if they know which ship did this…
They already know. The captain will probably end up in prison for a long time, and company which owns the ship will pay for the deliberate damage. Would be good too if they can crack who from the crew works for Russian saboteurs besides the captain. Unlikely it's just one person.
Crazy that you can splice optical cable..
They actually have very cool devices that will automatically align and fuse two fibers and estimate the loss of the bond.
how much do one of those bad boys cost?
The cheapest ones are surprisingly cheap at less than $1,000 and the highest end ones are $10,000
Today, we're going to talk to John Owens and learn about the process of splicing fiber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zN20ZVInfU
I mean… they get terminated somehow, right?
True, but splicing without leaving behind a powered repeater is different from the final termination with active electronics on the end.
It's pretty cool tech
I’m saying you can terminate cleanly without needing a repeater.
To be clear, I’m saying to terminate each end of the cut cable to a terminating device that continues the flow of light, not just the termination at the beginning/end of the line. Sorry if that wasn’t obvious.
Certainly worth blowing up some russian ships to make sure it doesn't happen again
Shhh, or somebody will realize how much slack there is in the system (for very good reasons, as evidenced here) and "optimize" it away...
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Slack took up 50% of the bandwidth on those cables considering how many notifications and channels I alone get spammed with from work.
Can anyone explain why there wasn't any BGP activity on the Finland-Germany systems when the cable broke, while for Lithuania there was a massive spike?
Unfortunately it's been a long time since I learned about BGP, if anyone could help out here I'd be grateful.
Each BGP hop represents an ISP so when an ISP reroutes traffic internally there's no need for changes to external BGP announcements. Clearly ISPs in the Baltic region have multiple paths and don't depend on any one cable.
Exactly what the internet was built for!
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