Red Sea Cables Cut Affecting Europe-Asia-MidEast Internet Traffic
Two cables linking Europe to the Middle East and Asia have reportedly been damaged in the Red Sea affecting Internet traffic between these locations. While cable cuts happen periodically, this one seems a bit suspicious. In the past the Houthis have claimed they did not do this, that is kind of like Jeffrey Dahmer saying he was not a cannibal – not terribly believable.
Undersea cables are very important to the Internet because they are much faster and higher capacity than satellite traffic. There are about a million miles (really) of undersea cables and there are maybe 100-200 incidents a year, most of which are accidental.
The two cables are SMW4 (Southeast Asia, Middle East and Western Europe) and IMEWE (India, Middle East, Western Europe). Each cable cost around $500 million to build at the time.
In addition, Kuwait says the FALCON GCX cable, also running under the Red Sea was cut.
Three cables in the same area at the same time is not a coincidence or an accident.
In the United Arab Emirates, Internet users complained of slower Internet speeds.
Neither is four cables.
This is a completely different form of cyberattack. Don’t attack the systems, attack the infrastructure that allows the systems to do work.
We have seen similar attacks on land in the US and Europe and I expect these to continue. It is harder to attack these undersea cables although China demonstrated an undersea robot last year that can cut through even armored cable in minutes. And it is remotely controlled. On land all you need is a SawzAll. Much of the cable is not armored at all and a lot of it is just laid on the ocean floor. In many cases, not very deep. On land the cable is on poles, on walls and in manholes – often not even protected with a (useless) padlock.
To fix these Sed Sea cuts you have to hire an ocean-going cable repair ship. They have to sail to the suspected location. They have to pull up both pieces of the damaged cable and then make splices (usually two of them) to fix the problem. This is neither cheap nor quick. If you are willing to pay, sometimes you can go to the head of the line, but still the process typically takes weeks. For cable that is on land, typically the repairs take days. Depending on how much surplus capacity and also route redundancy, users could be down for the duration.
Right now everyone is keeping the lid on the news, probably because they cannot prove who did it, but we will find out more relatively soon because you cannot keep the lid on for long.
Terrorists understand all of this and often pick vulnerable spots where, for example, the cable is not deep or there is not redundancy.
Welcome to terrorism, 2025 version.
Credit: Euro News
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