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Did you know that our access to the World Wide Web is primarily facilitated by miles of undersea cables, not satellite signals? 95 per cent of international data is carried through these “information super-highways”, merely the width of a garden hose, as the ABC reported on March 13, 2024 (“The cloud under the sea: China and the U.S. are wrestling over a web of cables we never see, but rely on every day”). Consider the vulnerabilities inherent in this system.

There are two main threats to submarine cables: physical tampering and digital hacking. Accidental damage from commercial fishing and shipping, as well as underwater earthquakes, creates 150 to 200 subsea cable faults each year. More worryingly, cables may be damaged or tapped by pirates, terrorists or aggressor states.

Tonga and Taiwan have experienced disruptions to their internet access – the former due to a natural hazard, and the latter thanks to human interference (see News Weekly‘s infographic here).

Disasters

In January 2022, an underwater volcanic eruption created tsunamis that severed the undersea cable that supplies Tonga’s internet connection. Atmospheric ash obstructed satellite communications.

For three days, the island-nation was completely cut off from the world, and it took five weeks for the international cable to be restored, during which families had no way of contacting their loved ones except through spotty satellite connections.

Taiwan has experienced 27 instances of damage to its submarine cables over the past five years, ostensibly by Chinese fishing vessels “accidentally” breaking them with errant anchors trailing along the ocean floor. The cables take months to repair. The Taiwanese Government has begun to prepare for the scenario where their country might lose contact with the rest of the globe.

After a missile attack by Houthi militants on the British-owned vessel Rubymar off the coast of Yemen on February 18, three internet cables were damaged, most likely by the Rubymar’s anchor, disrupting 25 per cent of Red Sea internet traffic.

Over 90 per cent of Europe-Asia internet traffic is routed through the Red Sea, and it is challenging to undertake repair work in a warzone. Repair vessels are unlikely to obtain permission to enter Yemen’s territorial waters, and the insurance costs for vessels in such dangerous areas are huge – up to $US150,000 ($A233,700) per day.

Last June, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev warned that Russia could wreck the undersea cables linking the United States and Europe to the internet, as a reprisal for the West’s alleged role in blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

The Centre for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) points to Russia’s capacity to tamper with undersea cables: “Moscow has two primary means by which it could directly threaten the cables: sub­marines and surface vessels that can deploy autonomous or manned submersibles.”

Such sabotage may aim at severing government or military communications, especially during a war; undermining economic competition; or isolating a target population.

In August 2021, the Irish Naval Service investigated possible tampering by a suspected Russian deep-sea vessel off the coast of Ireland. Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, had been observed mapping Irish landing points for subsea cables connecting Europe to the U.S.

The Russian Navy even has a marine mammal program, using dolphins, seals and beluga whales. Naval News posits: “It is plausible that beluga whales could covertly reconnoitre undersea infrastructure. They are the ultimate stealthy operator and can dive to depths of about 1,000 metres (3,280 feet).”

Another danger is that information may be siphoned from cables. CSIS explains that this may be accomplished “in one of three ways: inserting backdoors during the cable manufacturing process; targeting onshore landing stations and facilities linking cables to networks on land; or tapping the cables at sea”.

“Each is more difficult than the one before, and the last – tapping the cables at sea – is believed to be so technically challenging that it is not publicly known whether any country is even capable of it.”

Yet, Washington and Beijing have both accused each other of doing so, and are trying to out-manoeuvre each other to wrest dominance over the global system.

Control

The very first trans-Atlantic submarine cable was constructed for the telegraph. It was completed on August 5, 1856. Comprised of seven copper wires encased in rubber, tarred hemp and a sheath of iron wires, it soon failed after the voltage was raised too high and damaged its insulation.

The Asia-Pacific National Internet Registry narrates:

“Over the ensuing years, techniques improved, with the addition of in-line amplifiers (or repeaters) to allow the signal to be propagated across longer distances, and progressive improvements in signal processing to improve the capacity of these systems.

“Telegraph turned to telephony, valves turned to transistors and polymers replaced rubber, but the basic design remained the same: a copper conductor sheathed in a watertight insulating cover, with steel jacketing to protect the cable in the shallower landing segments.”

The first Australian telegraph system was established in 1872, with an overland route through Darwin, and short undersea segments connecting to Singapore and from thence to India and Britain.

Nowadays there are almost 400 submarine cables in service worldwide, totalling 1.2 million kilometres of cable. Each length of cable is designed to operate for at least 25 years.

CSIS reports:

“The planning, production, deployment, and maintenance of subsea cables are almost entirely in the hands of the private sector. Currently, the four largest suppliers are Alcatel Submarine Networks (France), SubCom (United States), NEC (Japan), and newcomer Huawei Marine Networks, rebranded as HMN Tech in 2020 (China), whose market share has progressively risen to 10 per cent.”

Over the past decade, content providers such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon have become prominent investors in undersea cables to maintain connections between their data centres.

U.S. cable-laying company SubCom is currently building the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 6 (SE-ME-WE 6) network, running from Singapore to France with almost 20,000 kilometres of fibre linking multiple nations.

SubCom gives the United States tremendous control over the international stream of data. Chinese company HMN Tech is making inroads; it would have snagged the SE-ME-WE 6 contract had the U.S. Government not blocked it. This was one of six private deals in the past four years where the U.S. has intervened to bar Chinese companies from the deal or compel cables to be re-routed to avoid direct links from China to the U.S.

(HMN Tech’s parent, Huawei, is widely and credibly suspected of being in thrall to the Chinese Communist Party.)

Map of subsea cables | Image: Telegeography

Reuters journalist Joe Brock observes:

“The South China Sea has been essentially blocked off from U.S. companies so they can no longer run cables through there, so they’re running cables around. Chinese companies can’t run cables to the U.S., which is the biggest internet market in the world.”

In May 2023, the Chinese Government opened talks with ten South-Pacific countries, offering loans to erect and expand their telecommunications networks through Huawei. China presents an affordable option for developing nations keen to catch up with the rest of the world.

In response, the U.S. is funding the Central Pacific cable, connecting American Samoa with Guam and extending to various other Pacific islands, such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea.

Digital Danger

Hackers are also an ever-present threat to the World Wide Web, if they manage to gain control over network management systems.

Last month, several French government departments sustained a series of cyber-attacks. Pro-Russian hacker group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for targeting the French Interministerial Directorate of Digital Affairs. Its modus operandi is “distributed denial of service” attacks (DDoS), overwhelming a website, server or network with a flood of internet traffic, causing it to go offline.

Recently, Microsoft engineer Andres Freund found malicious code “embedded deep inside XZ Utils, some software designed to compress data used inside the Linux operating system, which runs on virtually all publicly accessible internet servers.”

The Economist reported:

“Those servers ultimately undergird the internet, including vital financial and government services. The malicious code would have served as a ‘master key’, allowing attackers to steal encrypted data or plant other malware.”

Freund may have saved the entire world from a massive cyber-attack.

Professor John Naughton told The Guardian:

“XZ Utils is open-source software, that is, software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify and enhance. Much open source is written and maintained by small teams of programmers, and in many cases by a single individual.

“In XZ Utils, that individual for years has been Lasse Collin… about two years ago a developer ‘with no prior online footprint’ and calling himself Jia Tan appeared out of the blue and started making helpful contributions to the XZ Utils library.”

The malware-infected updates were released by Jia, suspected of being involved with Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

Naughton reflects:

“We have constructed a whole new world on top of a technology that is intrinsically and fundamentally insecure. … we are critically dependent on open-source software that is often maintained by volunteers who do it for love rather than money – and generally without support from either industry or government.”

The internet has become an integral part of modern society, the vehicle for our banking and payments, interface with government and health services, communications with loved ones and strangers, source of entertainment and education, and means of work. This entire virtual world can collapse in the blink of an eye. Are we prepared for such a catastrophe?

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Andrea Piacquadio.