IT Essentials: Anchors aweigh, cables ahoy

How do you protect infrastructure when attackers don’t care if they’re caught?

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Little known fact: cutlasses are great at cutting cables

What began as an ordinary week has turned into the All About Cables Show, as piratical attacks on the world’s infrastructure ramp up.

The recent spate of sabotage actually began back in November, with two cables severed in the Baltic Sea.

This week Sweden reached out to China for help over a ship accused of deliberately dragging its anchor to damage two more Baltic cables. A few days later, a land-based cable was cut in the same region, at the same time as the ITU announced a new resilience body to protect the world’s internet infrastructure.

The Baltics, while not exactly the high seas, directly border Russia and are a hotbed of covert operations and sabotage. That’s probably why Meta, which this week announced plans to lay its own cable around the world, is avoiding the region, as well as the Red Sea, South China Sea and other areas of geopolitical tension.

Data cables like these are critical infrastructure by any definition. Thanks to the internet’s distributed architecture, severing one doesn’t automatically cut off a region’s internet access (in most cases. An attack on the only two cables serving the Taiwanese island of Matsu last year is an example of how effective this type of sabotage can be) but can have dramatic effects on latency.

These attacks, which are often linked (though not directly attributable) to China and Russia, are why NATO is now testing aquatic drones as a protection mechanism.

Catching the culprits in the act may serve to dissuade future attacks, but it depends on how much the guilty countries care about the opinions of the world stage - and how vulnerable they are to sanctions.

For example, Xi Jinping often prefers to maintain plausible deniability; but Vladimir Putin, who spins sanctions as a jealous West acting against Russia, depends on maintaining his strongman image to retain power at home.

With the end of the year approaching, we’ve put out essential reading for all techies: our Christmas gift guide to suit all budgets (can also be used as inspiration if you don’t know what to ask for!) and predictions for how the IT landscape will change in 2025. Based on the editorial team’s years of market watching, these are a solid forecast for the coming 12 months.

In this week’s Ctrl Alt Lead podcast I spoke to US-based Richard Richison about the collapse of multifactor authentication and how he’s replaced it across his global company. Is it RIP for MFA?

John Leonard has a brilliant sit-down with Stephane Tanguy, CIO & CTO at EDF Labs, about how the multinational energy company is preparing for a quantum-based future.

And Penny Horwood has been at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas all week, with ongoing coverage of the major keynotes and big announcements.