The best story surrounding this was a mole who was identified via taps on Russian cables. They were unwilling to prosecute him for fear of tipping off the Russians so he got off and was used to funnel disinformation.
My favorite part was that the Russians detected our undersea tap, found it, and put it in a Moscow museum complete with the stamp "Property of United States Government."
In some ways, the story of someone getting ripped off like that leaves the victim with a better story for themselves than simply being a guy who has four super bowl rings even though he doesn't actually play football.
Which is not to applaud theft, but rather to highlight the unsympathetic qualities of the victim.
Why would anybody downvote me on THIS site for opposing Trump? Do you like the bitter Steve Bannon attacks on the tech industry? Do you think immigration is a bad idea? Do you find him to be an honest, decent, likeable man? Do you agree with his moves to get science out of scientific policy-making? Do you favor his attitude of "Truth is whatever I tweet it is?"
Making others believe you're able and willing to interfere with cables is an effective and bloodless way of force projection. For a player like Russia, who's always been big on visible activities shrouded in a hint of plausible deniability, this fits.
I was at the talk where CDS Peach discussed the cutting of cables. The gist of it was that the UK navy would want to start patrolling/monitoring incoming UK cables as it was a vulnerability point that he felt was ... a likely target of those who might work against the UK interest.
It was a pretty interesting talk. The video can be found here:
I guess we're entering the time of mutually assured cable destruction. Cheapest way to defend is to ensure the Russians know you can cut all their comms immediately.
Of course Russia could be doing that in response to US activity.
Does anyone know if the data flowing across cables like these is typically encrypted? Does the infrastructure itself provide any defense against a submarine hacking into a cable and installing a device that can monitor traffic?
I would hope that the infrastructure could add its own encryption across the link to defend against unauthorized interception.
It is possible to do this, you can get DWDM transmission equipment with encryption built in, I assume some submarine cable capacity purchasers make use of this, but is raises the cost by a decent amount.
Wait, really? That’s shocking to me - I would have assumed the entire link was encrypted E2E. Are there technical limitations that make this infeasible?
as a network engineer for the most part
we consider it the responsibility of the end user to encrypt their traffic, we function mostly as the freeway of the internet. some exceptions are when we have links through enemy territory such as through a foreign territory we are traditionally adversarial with. There are exceptions such as Google's anger at their backbone being snooped.
Considering that AMD processors now have the streaming encryption capacity to encrypt data as it travels to and from the memory controller, I think we're at a point where performing high bandwidth symmetric encryption is not significantly more expensive than the existing encoding/transport costs.
I believe that until recently neither Azure or AWS had a datacenter in the UK. Cutting undersea cables between the UK and the US / Europe / Ireland could have some serious consequences in the UK, at the very least on the economy, possibly on its infrastructure (payment systems, communications, etc).
But aren't terrestrial cables more vulnerables than undersea cables? Cutting undersea cables require sophisticated technologies. Cutting terrestrial cables just requires a local guy with a map and some TNT. It's impossible to protect thousands of km of cables.
Terrestial cables are easy to repair, in terms of hours. For undersea cables, this could take weeks or months, depending on location and wheather conditions.
Satellites are a poor choice for this particular problem (i.e. when you think an adversary may cripple your communication capabilities), because they can be disrupted, especially if your adversary is one of the premier states in spaceflight and weaponry.
A more resilient choice is troposcatter [1], which has evolved since the 50s [2][3]. A nice property of troposcatter is that it's difficult to intercept and difficult to disrupt between the origin and the destination.
Of course, such a system still lacks the bandwidth for day-to-day commercial usage, by orders of magnitude.
I wonder how well 4QAM or something similar does in those situations. 2Ghz is a pretty fast rate, 8gbs + FEC is probably still not that large of a link though.
I don't think wireless technology will ever be able to compete with fiber for bandwidth. You can cram incredible amounts of data through glass. It's on the order of Petabits/second for a single strand.
Will be quite awhile before that is as cheap and has as much bandwidth as those cables. The other disadvantage(s) is/are broadcasting your communication emissions in open air, weather or otherwise other types of interference (naturally occurring or deliberate).
and not too long ago a big portion of Internet were rerouted to Russia (BGP). One must wonder what they are up to.
Perhaps the Russian is mapping the world’s Internet, particularly on identifying critical infrastructure which without them would paralyze the world.
My theory is based on North Korea. Imagine NK owns its own cable (I believe they just have its own country interent, but still rely on the global cables) or is successful to hijack while severing communication of the rest of the world, NK can strike its adversaries without worries. Apply this to Russian. We are so dependent on the Interent (think dns and ntp), we are doomed if we can’t communicate (let alone getting emergency alert).
Btw, I can’t help but have to leave a note about the last part of your username... :)
> and not too long ago a big portion of Internet were rerouted to Russia (BGP)
This happens every few months, and not always by Russian ISPs. This would never happen if all upstream providers had proper filters on accepting BGP requests.
It really means the current system of using BGP is not resilient, and never has been.
Show of power, threat total disruption of communication. I guess the point is "If we are only 12th most powerful economy (but equal defence wise) the 1st will suffer this much more from such an action."
Putin style politics, blackmailing like the Mafia. Sadly Trump starts to imitate this.
I would not assume the intention is to intercept data. Assuming this is accurate, it could be tactical repositioning given recent events. Some seem to think that Trump might actually take action in North Korea. If he does, that's going to radically escalate tensions between the US and China/Russia - both of whom border North Korea, and are keen to see them remain a buffer between US military installations and their homeland. Imagine some bizarro parallel universe where Russia and China are actively suggesting plans to invade Mexico and already well established in Guatemala. If we enter into another cold war era, electronic warfare including threats on communication systems (including satellites) would likely be the new invisible 'front' as all developed nations have become heavily dependent on these systems which remain extremely vulnerable.
Not so simple at the bottom of the ocean and working with pressurized cables, besides the fact that the data will most likely be encrypted at the link level.
Does it really matter? Most of the important data is already encrypted (and even the unimportant stuff like youtube video streams are served over HTTPS, not even sure why).
The real problem is them cutting or blowing up these cables.
if you can tap on petabytes/s of data with your probe, how can you move that data for analysis or how can you decrypt it in real time in case you only want to retransmit portions of it?
You should read the Snowden papers (or was this some other leak? I’m getting so confused by all the leaking). They have two methods: first a device at the location dumps most of the traffic they don’t need like porn or torrents. The remaining data can be reencoded to look like normal https or ssh or whatever and sent through a third cable to another main network location. The data can also be stored locally and retrieved.
If only the Internet was resistant to losing connections. I guess all we can do is give these guys more money to defend us from the big bad bear with a military that is a tiny fraction of ours.
I seriously doubt that a full-scale military assault on Russia is 1) going to be productive in the long run and 2) really not justified just to protect a cable. Given the ultra-big egos of donald and vladmir, any act that one might interpret as an assault would very likely result in massive amounts of firepower launching at civilian targets. Maybe I'm alone in accepting some spotting internet connection to Europe vs hundreds of thousands (or easily, millions) of casualties.
The problem from a game-theoretic point of view is that if your opponent believes you won't retaliate over something small, they can just keep nibbling small chunks. Better to have the public believe that you're super territorial and will react violently to the slightest provocation. I think Vlad and Donnie know this and incorporate it into their public images, which is part of the reason you describe them as "ultra-big egos".
But it's probably not necessary to shake a big military stick at every problem. That's been a consistent response throughout most of human history, and it rarely ends well for the folks that are not on top.
> Better to have the public believe that you're super territorial and will react violently to the slightest provocation.
That's how you end up fighting wars nobody wanted. If you threaten Armageddon over every little thing and then don't deliver, nobody is going to take you seriously when you're, well, serious.
I'm convinced that's how the US ended up bombing Serbia - the Clinton administration tried to buy a little cheap grace by threatening the Serbs, thinking Milosevic would knuckle under and that would be that. But they were ignored. More threats followed and were also ignored. At some point Clinton had to do something or nobody on the planet was ever going to believe he had the backbone to carry out a threat.
or what they're doing is placing remotely detonated charges for later simultaneous usage should the need arise. (I'm not saying I think this is what has happened, but it's just a thought)
if you lose significant capacity (or all capacity) simultaneously you can't fall back to the "internet is resilient" routine. you're straight up screwed.
https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...