An addenum to this blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago on cyber threats to submarine cable systems. I mentioned that some folks "showed a weary, eyerolling, frustration" at the media’s preference for reporting the 1% of Bond film-themed incidents of nation state-directed vessels carrying out nefarious attacks on cables at sea. For them, I wrote "the 99% of benign incidents impose a much bigger total cost on the industry so that’s where the reporting should focus." It's worth pointing out what the minority of weary "eyerollers" are missing (or what they're choosing not to priortize). It is, of course, true that Mother Nature and 'Mother Accident' are indeed inflicing a lot more total damage on the submarine cable ecosystem than deliberate nefarious acts by adversarial nation states. However, let's also be clear that neither nature nor accident will ever conspire to inflict a very specific type of damage at a very specific time. Nor will nature or accident conspire to time the disruption of submarine cable systems to coincide with other kinetic or cyber attacks that are either act of war-like or actual acts of war. Hence it may be entirely fair enough for investors in submarine cable systems to care most about benign threats. The rest of us should certainly be congnizant of those (more than we have been). However it's also only right that the rest of us should be preoccupied with the ultimately greater threat that's posed to the digital economy and national security by nefarious nation state threats.
From what I learnt attending Total Telecom's excellent #subnetsEMEA event the week before last, cyber threats to submarine cable systems can be grouped under three headings: 1 Corruption of monitoring systems; 2. Breach of landing sites; 3. Accessing user traffic on the ocean floor by hoisting a cable into a submarine, cutting and splicing it. No, it's isn''t April 1st. And yes, governments and national security agencies are taking all three types of risk very seriously. Read more in my new blog for Total Telecom: #submarinecables #submarinecablesecurity #cablecuts
