The risk of Russia- and China-backed attacks on undersea cables carrying international Internet traffic is likely to rise amid a spate of incidents in the Baltic Sea and around Taiwan, according to a report.
Submarine cables account for 99 percent of the world’s intercontinental data traffic and have been affected by incidents with suspected state support over the past 18 months.
Analysis by Recorded Future, a US cybersecurity company, singled out nine incidents in the Baltic Sea and off the coast of Taiwan last year and this year as a harbinger for further disruptive activity.
Photo: Taiwan Coast Guard via AP
The report said that while genuine accidents remained likely to cause most undersea cable disruption, the Baltic and Taiwanese incidents pointed to increased malicious activity from Russia and China.
“Campaigns attributed to Russia in the North Atlantic-Baltic region and China in the western Pacific are likely to increase in frequency as tensions rise,” the company said.
Incidents flagged by the report included the severing of two submarine cables between Lithuania and Sweden in the Baltic Sea last November, which investigators blamed on an anchor dragged by a Chinese vessel. In December a ship carrying Russian oil was seized after it severed cables between Finland and Estonia.
Incidents around Taiwan over the past 18 months include a Chinese-crewed freighter cutting cables between the island and its outlying Penghu Islands in February by repeatedly maneuvering in a zigzag pattern over the cables. The previous month, a Chinese-owned cargo ship was cited as the likely cause of damage to a Taiwan-US cable.
“While it is difficult to definitively attribute recent incidents in the Baltic Sea and around Taiwan to state-sponsored sabotage, such operations align with both Russia and China’s strategic objectives, recently observed activities, and current deep-sea capabilities,” the report said.
Recorded Future said a successful attack on multiple cables — which would cause prolonged disruption — would have to occur in deeper waters and would “very likely involve state-sponsored threat actors, due to the difficulty of accessing these sites.” Such an operation would probably take place before outright conflict, the report said.
Recorded Future identified 44 cable damages over the past 18 months, a quarter caused by “anchor dragging” and nearly a third by “unknown causes,” with seismic activity or natural phenomena causing 16 percent of the incidents.
Analysts added that damaging subsea cables could be an attractive tactic because it allowed states to target adversaries’ infrastructure via an unsophisticated method that could be passed off as an accident or be carried out by vessels without direct links to the attacks’ suspected sponsor.
Recorded Future said improved monitoring of cables and security measures around subsea infrastructure, as well as comprehensive stress tests, would help prevent an incident damaging multiple cables and causing “prolonged connectivity issues,”
Despite the high-profile Baltic and Taiwan incidents, the three most disruptive incidents were elsewhere: in the Red Sea in February last year when a Houthi missile caused a ship’s anchor to hit cables — leading to “significant impact on communication networks in the Middle East”; in west Africa a month later due to an underwater rock slide; and off the coast of South Africa in May last year due to a cable-dragging incident.
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
The Venice Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia Wednesday night on the Lido. The opening ceremony of the festival also saw Francis Ford Coppola presenting filmmaker Werner Herzog with a lifetime achievement prize. The 82nd edition of the glamorous international film festival is playing host to many Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Dwayne Johnson, and famed auteurs, from Guillermo del Toro to Kathryn Bigelow, who all have films debuting over the next 10 days. The conflict in Gaza has also already been an everpresent topic both outside the festival’s walls, where
RSS