Four Undersea Cables Cut In Middle East In Less Than a Week
As many of you may have heard, two undersea cables were cut on January 31st severing internet to millions of users in the middle east. At first it was reported that these cables were severed by a ship’s anchor, but it is now being confirmed that this is false. The map of undersea cables and those affected can be found here.
However, in the last few days, two more cables have been cut. An illuminating internet traffic report is here.
The probability of all of these events being random accidents seems vanishingly small. Could this be a new sort of attack intended to black out an entire region? If so – what could the motivations be and who could be behind this? Could this be done for commercial reasons? Could this be a government or terrorist organization about to mount an attack?
Some other enlightening posts can be found here: part I, part II, part III
Comment by kurifodo
February 6, 2008 @ 10:21 pm
I have never heard of this kind of attack being attempted before, but it seems like a successful and costly one. Recently another cable was discovered severed on top of the four mentioned in this post.
When you think about what you would have to do to recover from an attack like this, it seems like you would have to either drag up the line, repair it, and put it back in its place, or hopefully you could repair it underwater, but who knows how difficult that is. It was mentioned in the article above also that 90% of the internet traffic is routed through undersea cables and the rest through satellites, so this attack is very detrimental to the citizens of the supplied country(s).
I am curious as to why someone would target these cables. Is there a motive beyond causing a massive headache to those affected? Judging by the scale of the attack, it would seem like there might be.