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The governments of Germany and Finland fear the damage is the result of deliberate sabotage
A pair of submarine cables in the Baltic sea were severed this week in a move European governments fear is the result of deliberate sabotage by malicious actors.
On Sunday morning, the 218km BCS East-West Interlink cable, which connects Gotland, Sweden, and Lithuania, was damaged and taken offline.
A spokesperson for Arelion, which owns and operates the BCS East-West Interlink, described the damage to as “not partial damage, it’s full damage”.
The following day, the 1,200km C-lion-1 cable between Helsinki, Finland, and Rostock, Germany, was also severed. This cable represents the only direct data connection between Finland and Central Europe.
German and Finnish governments quickly released a joint statement on the damage, saying it must be treated as suspicious.
“We are deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea. The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times,” said the foreign ministers of both countries in a joint statement.
Russia, while not specifically blamed by any of government spokespeople, is the prime suspect for the attack, given the ongoing war in Ukraine and its attempts to destabilise Europe.
“Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies,” continued the joint statement.
“We have to say, without knowing exactly who it came from, that this is a hybrid action. We also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it was sabotage,” added German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters today.
According to Finland’s cyber security and telecoms firm Cinia, repairs on the cables should be completed within 15 days
The incident harkens back to 2022, when the Nord Stream gas pipelines were destroyed around the onset of the Russia–Ukraine war. Investigations are ongoing, but deliberate sabotage is strongly suspected.
However, while submarine cables are no doubt increasingly enticing targets for asymmetrical warfare, it should be remembered that the vast majority of submarine cable incidents are accidental or environmental in nature.
Last year, two cables and a pipeline in the Gulf of Finland were cut, sparking similar rumours of Russian sabotage. However, the damage was quickly linked to a Chinese merchant vessel in the area that had (intentionally or not) dragged its anchor through the impacted cables. Similarly, a pair of submarine cables in the Red Sea were damaged early this year, with blame initially pointed at Yemeni Houthi rebels that were attacking local shipping routes; today the mostly likely explanation appears to be more indirect, with the leading theory suggesting that the cables were cut by the trailing anchor of the Rubymar, a ship that had been hit by a Houthi missile.
Regardless of the cause of the damage to these cable routes, the potential impact on the surrounding data landscape has the potential to be severe. In areas served by multiple subsea cables, data traffic is typically rerouted quickly and with minimal impact to the end user. For countries that rely on only a single cable, however, cable damage can leave the entire nation cut off from the global data backbone, leaving them reliant on satellites to communicat. This is often the case for smaller island nations, for example Tonga, which had its only submarine cable cut off by a volcanic eruptuion in 2022.
As a result, it should come as no surprise that the submarine cable community is using this most recent incident of cable damage to promote the deployment of additional subsea routes, highlighting the growing need for alternative data traffic in an increasingly volatile geopolitical world.
“There have been many stories of high-profile cable cuts this year, highlighting the need for greater network redundancy. We are so reliant on these vital pathways to transport data, that more investment into alternative paths is needed to ensure that when a cable is down, whatever the reason, traffic isn’t impacted,” said Steve Roberts, SVP Network Investment at EXA Infrastructure. “We are seeing governments and regulators starting to take the security of subsea cables more seriously, and this, coupled with continued investment into new projects, will mean that the impact of outages can be lessened in future.”
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