The idea that saboteurs in wetsuits would dive to the bottom of the Mediterranean ocean and cut a graphic symbol optic dividing line, though not impossible, is highly unlikely, if only because doing so would be a corking way to wind up dead.
“These bloodlines argon carrying thousands of volts of power,” Mark Simpson, chief executive asideicer of SEACOM, told Wired. The company owns five submarine fiber optic strivings discharge from South and easternmost Africa to Asia and Europe. Attempting to cut such a line could easily kill you, he said, making sabotage “ pretty unusual and pretty dangerous.”
That’s not to say it didn’t happen, and so far, it’s one of the explanations the Egyptian military has glumered in the five days since naval forces arrested three men alleged(a) to apply attempted to cut an subsurface logical argument off the coast of Alexandria. The head of Egypt Telecom said the incident caused a 60 percent drop in net speeds.
The men have insisted they cut the cable by mistake. Egyptian officials seaport’t offered any further details on what incisively happened to the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4 for short) cable beyond saying the military stopped a “ wretched operation.”
Regardless of what exactly happened, the incident underscores the vulnerability of the world’s undersea communications cables to damage, intentional or not. Nearly 200 undersea fiber optic cables link the world’s telecommunications, and they are for the most part poorly armored, rarely patrolled and only on occasion monitored.
Telecommunications market research firm TeleGeography recently released an intricate represent (ironically, it is sponsored by Telecom Egypt) that traces the routes these cables follow. When a major cable breaks (or gets cut), it bathroom severely long-winded down internet connection speeds and pull down put countries completely in the dark. A cut cable off the coast of Alexandria in 2008 left Egypt, India, Pakistan and Kuwait in the dark. A 2006 earthquake in Taiwan damaged well-nigh(prenominal) cables and cut off communication to Hong Kong, South East Asia and China.
There has been some suggestion that the guys in Alexandria were treasure hunters who thought the cable skill contain copper, Simpson said. It wouldn’t be the first time someone cut a line trying to strike it rich. 2 years ago, a Georgian woman struck a fiber optic cable while digging for copper, acerb off internet access to neighboring Armenia for five hours.
Historically, however, undersea cables are more susceptible to accidental breakage by ship anchors, fish trawlers and natural disasters. Tim Stronge, a researcher at Telegeography, says such mishaps snap cables about 100 times a year. few countries try to prevent breakages by providing detailed naval maps and levying heavy fines for dropping anchor or casting nets in close proximity to cables.
“The industry is accustomed to cables breaking,” Stronge said. “They are armored when they are close to set down and generally they are conceal slightly under the sea floor closer to the beach.”
A genius submarine cable is anywhere from 0.75 to 2.5 inches thick. The armored cables closer to shore can have up to two layers of galvanized wires cling toing the fiber optic core (.pdf). These aren’t the kind of cables you cut with a pair of wire cutters.
That said, nothing is impossible, which is why it is somewhat affect that in that respect is little security in place to protect these vital cables from sabotage or terrorism.
“Other than obscurity and a few feet of sand, [the cables] are just there,” Andrew Blum, author of Tubes: A journeying to the Center of the Internet, told Wired. “The staff at a cable get station might patrol the path to the beach set down once or twice a day, but differently I’ve never hear of or seen any continuous security.”
A lack of security can leave cables vulnerable to attack. Some telecoms and governments use radar tracking systems to monitor the area about these cables. Such technology detects when a ship is getting hazardously close to a cable and can warn the vas of its proximity. But Blum says this high level of awareness can be “a boon to saboteurs” seeking the exact location of authoritative cables.
In places like Egypt, undersea cables are especially vulnerable because there is a bottleneck of 14 cables coming out of twain Alexandria and Cairo. Eight of them connect to the shores of Alexandria. Cutting cables in this area would have a domino effect that would hurt connectivity in galore(postnominal) countries. “What’s true for shipping is true for the internet,” Blum noted.
Cutting these cables would effectively slow down internet speeds in more than just Egypt. A ship anchor recently damaged six cables off the coast of Alexandria in February and led to outages in several East African countries. With so much of the continent’s connectivity fasten to such a small area, it would make it an appealing marker for would-be saboteurs.
That said, terrorist attacks and intentional cable cuttings are rare. Stronge has not heard of another case like that alleged to have happened in Egypt, and said whatever happened remains a matter of speculation.
“As far as I know, it hasn’t been proven that these men were cutting cables,” Stronge said. “It could be a case of these men being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could be Egyptian authorities being nervous about internet outages.”
Stronge said that his biggest fear is that this incident become undersea cable folklore, much like that old saw about sharks barbellate through the first submarine fiber optic cable.
“You so far hear that today,” he said. “What really happened was the cable was mislaid and it was in any case taut between the mountains and valleys of the ocean floor. It had nothing to do with sharks. I worry that people will now just copy that there are saboteurs across the coast of Alexandria.”
Materials taken from WIRED
0 comments:
Post a Comment