Beta News reports that 3 undersea cables carrying a huge amount of Internet traffic for the Middle East and South Asia were cut within 40 minutes of each other, resulting in large outages in several countries. The outage underscores the immense strategic value of fiber optic cables in the information age. It incidentally highlights the degree to which the economic system of the world is dependent on a hegemon simply for existence. First, to the news:
Internet and voice traffic to much of the Middle East and south Asia has been disrupted by the loss overnight of three major cables spanning the Mediterranean.
According to a notice from France Telecom, the three provisioning cables linking Sicily to Egypt were lost within about 40 minutes of one another Friday morning (local time). A France Telecom-owned maintenance ship will be dispatched to inspect the site within a few hours. Until then, it’s not known what might have caused the cuts. … the hardest-hit countries so far are Maldives (100% out of service), India (82% out of service), Qatar (73%), Djibouti (71%), and United Arab Emirates (68%). Anecdotal reports also suggest that Egypt’s widely affected as well.
RIPE notes the pivotal role that the undersea cable network plays in the global system and the particularly vulnerability of Middle Eastern and South Asian cables to disruption. Nearly a year ago today three cables were cut in almost the same place.
On the morning of 30 January 2008, two submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged near Alexandria, Egypt. The media reported significant disruptions of Internet and phone traffic in the Middle East and South Asia. About two days later, a third cable was cut, this time in the Persian Gulf, 56 kilometers off the coast of Dubai. In the days that followed more news on other cable outages came in. …
But before anyone digs out his tinfoil hate, RIPE noted that cable faults are not uncommon. Some 50 outages were reported in the Atlantic alone in 2007. However, the Middle and South Asia traffic runs through a relatively small group of cables, a sort of information choke point. A map of cables running through the Med is provided at the link.
The world map of cable routes shows that Europe, North America and East Asia are well connected; numerous cables connect the continents and countries. However, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have far fewer cable systems. Looking at the available bandwidth or capacity in these cables, the differences become even more apparent. Faults in cables connecting these regions therefore have a higher impact than comparable faults in trans-Atlantic cables.
The Financial Times says experts warn the outages may last up to two weeks. “Telecommunications industry experts warned that the potential impact could be significant and noted that a similar incident in late January which affected two of the same cables took almost two weeks to fix and caused severe disruption to business and individual users.” This will be extremely inconvenient and costly for businesses in the affected areas.
“The potential impact of an outage of this size cannot be underestimated – it is like severing a major artery,” said Mr Wright. “In a global economy with financial centres based around the world, and an increasing use of outsourced call centres and IT departments, it is essential that companies are confident in their communications networks.”
The man in the street might ask why fiber optic cables between South Asia and Europe are run under the Mediterranean at all instead of being laid above ground over the Middle East and North Africa. One answer, apart from the cost, is security. The cables are safer underwater. That is to say, proof from most bandits or terrorists and subject to long-term disruption only by the dominant naval power. The dominant naval power can prevent or allow cable repair ships to service a set of cables; permanently disrupt the bulk of information traffic flowing between many points over the globe but the thinking was that it wouldn’t. In some perverse way even al-Qaeda operatives and the LeT are cursing the undersea cable companies for not managing things better because they too are dependent upon the systems protected by the hegemon to attack the hegemon.
The conventional wisdom was that the United States, as the world’s system administrator, had a vested self-interest in supporting the financial, security and information systems upon which everyone — even nations hostile to it — relied. However, the recent upheavals in the financial system raise the intriguing possibility that actors driven by greed or ideology, may be tempted to subvert the operating system for their own gain. The comparable strategy in the computer world is achieved via the use of malicious rootkits. Instead of attacking the operating system from the outside, where its defenses are strongest, rootkits attack the system from the inside, exploiting trust.
Any application program is controlled by the kernel, and any system access (such as writing to/reading from the disk) is performed by the kernel. The application will call a kernel syscall, and the kernel will do the work and deliver the result back to the application. From a users viewpoint, these syscalls are the lowest level of system functions, and provide access to filesystems, network connections, and other goodies. By modifying kernel syscalls, kernel rootkits can hide files, directories, processes, or network connections without modifying any system binaries. Obviously, checksums to confirm the integrity of a system are useless in this situation.
While in the long run the subversion of the operating system will be bad for everyone, in the short run it may provide spectacular advantages to those who don’t plan on hanging around forever. As those who trusted Bernard Madoff now realize, nothing can be more damaging than an “inside job”. Things look perfectly normal all the way until the end. Thank God that while the financial components of the operating system look a little dicey, we can rely on the integrity of the world’s security and information systems to keep civilization going. Can’t we?
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25 Comments
1. dan:“However, the recent upheavals in the financial system raise the intriguing possibility that actors driven by greed or ideology, may be tempted to subvert the operating system for their own gain.”
This has happened before – remmember the (I think) 5 simultaneous, or near-simultaneous cuts?
How does it work – does it require submarines?
Does it not seem as though the defenses – all the defenses – are being tested? Consider, for example, the recent mass attack on the Pentagon and White House.
I think it increasingly less paranoid to vaguely fear that something bigger than Obama’s inauguration looms just beyond the horizon.
Dec 19, 2008 - 3:04 pm 2. forklift:Common outages are caused by fishing nets and ship anchors in the areas where the cables come out of the sea. A truly effective outage would be coupled with a sabotage of the gps system as the cable repair vessels absolutely rely on the superior navigation provided by gps positioning.
Dec 19, 2008 - 3:11 pm 3. dan:Fishing nets? Oh – like on or right near the shore?
Dec 19, 2008 - 3:12 pm 4. forklift:Some types of commercial fishing drag equipment along the bottom.
Dec 19, 2008 - 3:16 pm 5. jim in virginia:Al Qaeda may be good but I doubt they have a fleet of submarines. Or even one.
Dec 19, 2008 - 3:16 pm 6. Tony:However, if you were CIA or Mossad and wanted to cut off internet traffic between southwest Asia and Europe, could you find an easier way than this? Stop the bad guys from communicating by email or websites and make them use phones.
And, seriously, sometimes real accidents do just happen.
The original design of the Internet is based on re-routing, right? So, when the plumbing depicted in that glorious map of undersea cables is cut one or two or three pipes at a time, why doesn’t all the traffic on those pipes back up and go the other way around the world?
Dec 19, 2008 - 3:24 pm 7. RWE:After seeing what kind of trouble the Somali pirates have caused you have to wonder what a group with just a tad more sophistication could do. How much would a company or even an entire country pay to avoid that kind of disruption?
Of course, collecting the ransom might be difficult, since you could hardly park your pirate ship over the cable and wait until someone delivered a bag of money. Presumably it would cost no more to have someone deliver a half-dozen MK82 bombs to the same site instead. And that would not have to be a government service, either. I recall that even in the mid 70’s there were something like 114 privately owned jet fighters in the U.S. That number must have increased by leaps and bounds by now. A local air museum here announced the other day that they have acquired a flyable F-86; the same place has a Mig-17P that some college kids bought and then figured out would be too expensive and too challenging to operate.
So perhaps the future of conflict is not one of nation versus nation but of sophisticated villains versus the Blackhawks or Airwolf.
Dec 19, 2008 - 3:55 pm 8. Roderick Reilly:I thinks it’s THEM that are doing this.
Yes, the ubiquitous and misterious “THEM,” the supra-international umbrella organization that spawned the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers, among others. I am certain that Zionists are at the heart of this.
Oh, and it’s no longer “tin foil,” as that is obsolete. Aluminum foil works just as well, and is more widely available.
Dec 19, 2008 - 4:30 pm 9. jaymaster:Here’s a link to the ultimate online story about undersea cable. I used to be in the business.
It’s 12 years old (and 50 pages long!). But it’s still pretty much current and worth a read.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
Dec 19, 2008 - 4:37 pm 10. programmer:Given the tremendous amount of “offshoring” of data bases, etc. by large global companies, one tends to wonder how this will impact the current economic mess. Year end reports, etc. may be a tad late this year. Warning: personal bias ahead. I feel no compassion for any corporation that has transferred all its data processing to…Oh, lets say Mumbai, for example. If information and data is the life blood of the large corporation, this could certainly cut off a lot of oxygen flow to their brains.
Dec 19, 2008 - 5:28 pm 11. Enemy Action or Accident? » The Ethereal Voice:[...] From the Belmont Club…. Beta News reports that 3 undersea cables carrying a huge amount of Internet traffic for the Middle East and South Asia were cut within 40 minutes of each other, resulting in large outages in several countries. The outage underscores the immense strategic value of fiber optic cables in the information age. It incidentally highlights the degree to which the economic system of the world is dependent on a hegemon simply for existence. [...]
Dec 19, 2008 - 5:36 pm 12. dan:fsb? it’s interesting how no one ever guesses or proposes russia, even though its government is composed almost entirely of kgb. doesn’t realy count as a conspiracy theory if an entire government is actually former kgb, does it?
Dec 19, 2008 - 5:51 pm 13. SpeakEasy:I have to go with Occam’s razor on this one. However, this reminds me of a great read I enjoyed a good while ago about submarine actions during the Cold War. We (US) modified a submarine to hover over and splice into undersea cables leading to the USSR to (very effectively) listen in on their conversations. Today I would say there are easier ways so again I do not believe there is a correlation, but it was a good read.
Dec 19, 2008 - 5:55 pm 14. Jonathan Reed Winkler:Dan–it can be done with submarines, or things as innocuous as surface vessels dragging anchors or weighted fishing nets. Cuts happen all the time, but if they happen in places where there is very little redundancy the knock-on effects can be rather large, as seen here. Governments that pay very close attention to this want redundancy, reliability and capacity to be sure that the critical messages, commercial as well as geopolitical, can get to places of strategic importance as quickly as possible. The funny thing about cables (and satellites) is that if they’re out of sight, they’re often also out of mind. Until they break.
Jim in Virginia–I’d think that Mossad or CIA would be really cautious in cutting these things to get at Al Qaeda…there’s a very large user in the Persian Gulf who really did not like the last set of cuts in late January/early February.
Dec 19, 2008 - 5:57 pm 15. Cannoneer No. 4:One undersea cable carrying a huge amount of Internet traffic for the Middle East and South Asia cut would probably be an accident.
Two cables cut might be a coincidence.
Three cables cut? Most of us know what that is, even if we don’t know who.
India (82% out of service). So much for barely intelligible sing-song Tech Support. Telemarketers and bill collectors ardest hit.
Dec 19, 2008 - 6:20 pm 16. RWE:Jaymaster: That is an interesting article about undersea cables; thanks for the link. I will have to read the whole thing the next time I am confined to the house for days on end by a tropical storm. Which happens.
In the article they were discussing the different attitudes of telephony people and computer data people, and they even mentioned the coming of the Iridium satellite system. Ironically, this attitude problem is where the Iridium people really screwed up. Motorola failed to recognize the significance of the Internet and made their system suitable for voice only, like a telephone system. That was the big mistake, but they compounded it by making setting up to talk on the phone as complicated as those guns they used to assemble on The Man From UNCLE, charging a very high price for the both equipment and talk time, and then expecting the governments of Russia and China to do marketing for them. The company gave up on Iridium and even planned to deorbit the satellites, but finally sold it all for a ridiculously low price, the equivalent of getting a Ford Excursion Mega-SUV by sending in 4 cereal boxtops and 25 cents.
Dec 19, 2008 - 6:27 pm 17. dan:possibly mafia? if the cut was near sicily and the sicilian mafia was just decapitated?…
bah. could be a whale fart. but where’s the entertainment in that.
Dec 19, 2008 - 8:20 pm 18. John Moore:A big question I haven’t seen answered is whether the cuts happened in a place where the cables are very close together. If so (and I’d bet on it), accident is the best explanation. In that case, the cables are not really redundant – they share at least one single point of failure. But unless efforts are made to create redundancy, one would expect cables to usually follow the same route.
Anyone have solid info?
Dec 19, 2008 - 9:34 pm 19. jaymaster:RWE,
Yes, it’s damn long. But that’s what separates the men from the boys, so to speak!
And speaking of Iridium, that certainly ended up being a commercial failure. But those birds are still up there, and I suspect they aren’t going to waste.
I’m an avowed libertarian. But I don’t mind the government subsidizing some stuff like this every now and then.
Dec 19, 2008 - 10:03 pm 20. X3NA:With oil headed for $25 a barrel the Somali Pirates gotta make a living somehow. What better way than to cut off their brother Arabs’ access to bittorrent. “You don’ get to pirate your Swedish orgy movies ’til you pay the real pirates, ya landlubber scalawags! Argh!”
Dec 20, 2008 - 6:18 am 21. V.B. Bart:I also remember the January, 2008 incident when a couple of the cables were severed. There were some comments at that time saying that such cuts would force traffic from the Middle East and South Asia to reroute through European communication points, thus making it much easier for Western intelligence services to monitor. Does anyone else remember this, perhaps in more detail? Also, would it be true?
Dec 20, 2008 - 7:20 am 22. RWE:Jaymaster: Ironically, the largest user of Iridium turned out to be the Department of Defense.
Of course, the military can have people trained to set up a system for comm when required. And despite certain aspects of the system that worried us at the Pentagon relative to military use, it seems to be popular, at least among the special ops crowd.
Dec 20, 2008 - 7:31 am 23. Internet cables to Mid-East and India cut - again « Ravalli County News:[...] “… 3 undersea cables carrying a huge amount of Internet traffic for the Middle East and … [...]
Dec 20, 2008 - 6:42 pm 24. Pseudo-Polymath » Blog Archive » Tuesday Highlights:[...] Undersea … also note Benedict on Islam. [...]
Dec 23, 2008 - 5:59 am 25. Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e46v1:[...] Undersea … also note Benedict on Islam. [...]
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