https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
It was a pretty interesting talk. The video can be found here:
https://rusi.org/event/annual-chief-defence-staff-lecture-20...
With the youtube video here :
Of course Russia could be doing that in response to US activity.
I would hope that the infrastructure could add its own encryption across the link to defend against unauthorized interception.
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.
The truth is much simpler, and less explosive, it's usually a JCB digger operated by the local water/gas/leccy company that causes mayhem.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/space...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_scatter [2] http://www.comtechsystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tro... [3] http://www.mwrf.com/systems/troposcatter-system-maintains-50...
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... :)
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.
Look up bgp hijack nanog
Putin style politics, blackmailing like the Mafia. Sadly Trump starts to imitate this.
Might be worth the cost, too, since then there's no reason for people to cut your cables.
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?
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.