One important question that I'm unclear on is how long it takes to fix one of these cables. If it takes months then that is quite a wide window in which an attacker could incrementally take down cables.
In this particular case, it seems like the attackers were trying for plausible deniability (making it look like an accident with an anchor). A comprehensive series of "accidents" wouldn't fit that goal.
(And if they decide they don't care about plausible deniability, they could use sub-deployed timed mines to take out every cable at once.)
Even if these "accidents" are a state sponsored (or at least condoned) action, it seems certain states have realized they can happen over and over again without consequences[0].
The frustrating part of this kind of petty tactic is that bullies can do just enough to annoy and inconvenience their targets, while never quite doing enough to make it worth expending the political capital to hold them to account. From the bully's perspective there's no downside. And if legitimate accidents or rogue actions get portrayed as deliberate then all the better - that just reinforces the bully's reputation as an actor to be feared while further eroding trust in the international institutions that may one day challenge it.
In an actual war, you hit the repair equipment and personnel [1].
(As to the Geneva Conventions note, we're discussing a hypothetical war with Russia. The status quo, including rules of war, are going to be rewritten by the victors.)
If you are planting one cutting device (small bomb etc), you could do the same thing 10 miles down the line and blast it again without having to revisit the area.
The communication does not have to be fast, so they could use extremely low frequency signals, which apparently can travel over hundreds to thousands of miles in seawater. On top of that, they could build a mesh network.
True but ships and crews with the equipment to do the repairs are limited. It's possible to overwhelm the repair capacities. Also, it takes time to physically travel between cuts so while cuts in the Baltic might take a week or two to fix, a cut in the Atlantic and one in the Baltic may take a week or two just for travel.
They already know. The captain will probably end up in prison for a long time, and company which owns the ship will pay for the deliberate damage. Would be good too if they can crack who from the crew works for Russian saboteurs besides the captain. Unlikely it's just one person.
I’m saying you can terminate cleanly without needing a repeater.
To be clear, I’m saying to terminate each end of the cut cable to a terminating device that continues the flow of light, not just the termination at the beginning/end of the line. Sorry if that wasn’t obvious.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Slack took up 50% of the bandwidth on those cables considering how many notifications and channels I alone get spammed with from work.
Can anyone explain why there wasn't any BGP activity on the Finland-Germany systems when the cable broke, while for Lithuania there was a massive spike?
Unfortunately it's been a long time since I learned about BGP, if anyone could help out here I'd be grateful.
Each BGP hop represents an ISP so when an ISP reroutes traffic internally there's no need for changes to external BGP announcements. Clearly ISPs in the Baltic region have multiple paths and don't depend on any one cable.
