Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

My completely unfounded pet conspiracy theory is that China or Russia gained control of the company that owns the fibre repair ship.

Cut fibres one at a time, and the victim will pay you to insert a listening device into their fibre.

If you simply cut the fibre with a submarine, they might get suspicious.

If you’re repairing an “accidental” cut everyone expects the outage. They’ll investigate the cut, not the repair.



Can’t you simply encrypt all traffic across the cable at each end point? I’d be surprised if that wasn’t common practice these days. And if wasn’t common practice when these cables were deployed, seems like it would be possible to retrofit.


This was a power cable...


Similarly, you could insert a device that can instantly sever the cable on command, such as a specific acoustic pattern.

In case of war, simply flood the area with an encoded sonar ping and a bunch of links all get cut at the same time.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: