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| Image by Royal Netherlands Navy |
Across from me sat a lieutenant commander of the Royal Dutch Navy. Now in the vast majority of cases it is of no importance who is on the same train as me, but this time it is worth mentioning. In that train I was preparing this blog, in which I take you to sea, and even to the bottom of it. What a funny coincidence that this unsuspecting naval officer was sitting there.
There
are more and more reports lately about submarine internet cables that get
damaged. And not by accident, but as a deliberate action of the Russian shadow
fleet. For example, an oil tanker makes a detour and drops its anchor right
above one of those cables. In doing so, it tears that cable apart.
That
is quite a heavy-handedly way to destroy internet connections. Very different
from what we have been used to see from the Russians, because they also have
masses of smart hackers in government service, who are perfectly capable of
disrupting our connections digitally. That is cheaper and easier. Western
navies and coast guards now keep a close eye on ships that veer off course and
have their anchors in the water. So why this approach?
Well,
the damage is greater, in three ways. It takes longer to repair the damage
done, the repair costs many times more and the number of victims is greater.
After all, a specialized ship has to be sent to physically repair the cable.
And because of the greater, physical damage, the disruption is also greater –
if you manage to hit the right cable, it can have major consequences for
internet users at both ends of that cable, far into their hinterlands. And as
we know, disruption is one of the tools that Russia likes to use in this Second
Cold War. That disruption goes much further than your children not being able
to play their online game for a while or TikTok being down. International
payment transactions can be disrupted, the economy takes a hit and fear grows
among the population – if the Russians can do this, what else can they destroy?
Wait
a minute, you might be thinking, I'm on wifi, why should I care about those
cables on the bottom of the sea? Well look, that wifi network that you use,
ends somewhere at a wifi router: that box at home in your meter cupboard.
Offices, shops, restaurants, airports, hotels and all other wifi providers also
have a device somewhere that is the beginning and end of that network. From
there, in the other direction, everything goes with cables. From your meter
cupboard, a cable goes underground to your internet provider, and from there on
to the internet and to nodes. These nodes are also connected to each other, and
so there is a whole network of cables across the globe. And because the earth
consists largely of seas, many of those cables run over the seabed. When you
are on the internet, your searches zoom through the seas and oceans at dizzying
speed. So yes, you too can experience problems if they manage to hit the right
cable.
What
about Starlink, Elon Musk’s network, which consists of thousands of satellites?
Starlink customers have their own antenna, which picks up the signal from
space. But ultimately these radio signals come together in Musk 's meter
cupboard, which has a cabled connection to the internet. In that respect,
Starlink is nothing more than a kind of overgrown wifi network. (Of course, Musk's
meter cupboard is a joke. In reality, there are ground stations that listen to
the signals from space with large antennas). By the way, this
interactive map nicely shows how immense
the Starlink network is, and it makes you also understand why the satellites
have to be able to perform maneuvers to avoid collisions with their peers.
No
matter how you look at it, we depend on those cables for the internet. A dozen
of them come ashore in the Netherlands. Most of them connect us to England and
from there to the US, a few to Scandinavia; one, with a stopover at the
westernmost point of England, continues to the US. A single cable break will
not immediately isolate us from the rest of the world, but it is always
disruptive.
This blog started with a coincidence, and maybe another coincidence will follow. It is not unthinkable that the lieutenant commander also reads this blog and thinks: hey, opposite me sat a man typing away on his iPad. Could this be about me? And it would be even more coincidental if that officer is involved in the protection of our submarine cables.
And in the big bad world…
- In order to use the Internet, we also need to properly protect the electricity network.
- The exchange of personal data between Europe and the US is once again in jeopardy.
- Someone developed a weapon against AI bots that want to get information from websites
- the hack at TU Eindhoven started with stolen login
details.
- AI can harm end -to -end encryption
- another brand of cars got hacked (via starlink , but that is something completely different from the
Starlink in this blog).
- of course you can also hack a charging station.
- Cybersecurity is taking a beating under Trump.
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