Fourth Undersea Cable Taken Offline In Less Than a Week

An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.

Comments

Cue...

[fyngyrz]

...the bombs in 3... 2... 1...

Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't think this is either a precursor to military action, or a direct attack on Iran's about-to-launch Euro-based oil market?

4 cuts, as far as I am concerned, is no co-incidence. I literally expect to turn on the TV and see bombs falling any day now. Economy down, turn up the war machine. It really is a common historical sequence.

Re:Cue...

[ivan256]

It does seem like it's not coincidence, but I just don't see the link between this and an attack on Iran. What could possibly be the connection between two cables in Egypt, and us bombing Iran? Do you honestly think that people within the agency that created this network are foolish enough to think that even several more of these cuts will stop the flow of traffic? It's more likely that a middle eastern group is doing this to reduce western influence without any real grasp on just how resilient the network is.

Re:Cue...

[djdavetrouble]

You're not thinking outside of the tin-foil box.
These are obviously failed attempts to tap internet traffic.
The NSA has long been rumored to be able to live splice
undersea fibre optic cables.

Re:Cue...

[AKAImBatman]

I wish the US would stop trying to impose themselves on the rest of the world.

I don't think this is the U.S. The U.S. would make sure to cut all the cables at once, therefore ensuring maximum disruption and surprise at the time of the attack. The way this is being done is slow and relatively uncoordinated. Which suggests either a probing maneuver or a lack of resources.

The U.S. is fairly straightforward with its objectives. The brass doesn't like taking things slowly when it comes to war. The plan is to get in, blow stuff up, rebuild the critical infrastructure, then leave. It doesn't always work that way (e.g. Iraq), but it is the ideal scenario that every General and Admiral desires. Long and protracted wars are far too costly. Not just to the U.S. itself, but also on a personal level for the brass.

Which raises the question: Who would gain from slowly cutting international Internet access in the Middle East? The myriad of plausible answers contrasted with the lack of any solid suspects scares me a hell of a lot more than any U.S. military operations. IMHO, it's in the best interest of the U.S. to find out what is going on NOW. Something big may be coming down the pipeline in the middle east. If and when it comes, it's not going to be pleasant.

Re:Cue...

[freedom_india]

They are a group of ultra-right extremists who have hijacked the Republican Party as a suitable vehicle to advance their cause. Why do i keep remembering William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" book?
Somehow i have a Deja Vu sense...

I bet EUR 100 (to be donated to Doctors without borders) that before this year runs out, we will have another major war with another country.

Anybody willing to dare?

Iran's Oil Bourse

[lekker biltong]

According to Wikipedia, Its Oil Bourse is going live on 1-11 February after delays.

Is it a coincidence?

I think not.

Re:[Citation Needed] --NT

[flyingsquid]

I agree that it looks mighty suspicious, but I have a hard time seeing how it could be a conspiracy. First, look at who's affected: Eygpt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Sri Lanka, even India. Don't get me wrong, I despise the White House and wouldn't trust anything Cheney said while his lips were moving, but I have trouble seeing why the United States would want to attack even one of these countries, particularly Saudi Arabia. Even if they do support and export terrorists, the Saudi leadership are close allies of the United States- we just sold them a shitload of JDAM satellite-guided bombs, after all, why would we then turn around and take out their internet access? And even assuming the U.S. or some other nation did want to attack one of these nations, why do it this way, which attacks the entire Middle East indiscriminately?

As suspicious as it looks, I think it's just really, really bad luck. But then again, maybe I need to get with the times and be a little more paranoid.

Re:[Citation Needed] --NT

[F34nor]

Well for one thing you may be mistaking the culprit.

Al-Qaeda's main enemy is not the US. It is Arab countries who are not conservative enough. 9-11 was about getting the US out of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA,) not about freedom or anything a vague as that. If Al-Qaeda was able to cut off Internet service to the KSA, UAE, Qatar, and etc. that would be a huge coup for Al-Qaedi. What do they object to? They object to, anything that allows people to question their limited ultra-wahabi dogma. Currently UAE is the official named target of Al-Qaeda's wrath.

Don't forget the largest US base in the region is in Qatar.

Fun with Bayes

[LaskoVortex]

Today we are going to use Bayes's theorem to determine the likelihood that all of this disabling of cables is malicious. We are not calculating the likelihood of conspiracy, just how likely it is that someone out there is disabling cables with ill purpose. (Of course, how many people does it take to disable or cut a cable with malicious intent? One? Two? More than one is by definition a conspiracy.)

First, we need a prior. Lets assume that the likelihood that someone is out there was planning to maliciously disable a cable before this latest round of disabling was about 0.0001. That's going to be our prior, 0.0001. Not very likely, and hopefully not too contentious. At this point, it doesn't really matter too much what the prior is, just that we have one. We'll see that after a few rounds of calculations, this prior washes out pretty quickly.

Now, lets assume that any time a cable is disabled, it is only about a 1% chance that said cable was disabled with malicious intent. Considering that historically these cables are cut or disabled only once a year, this assumption means that every 100 years, some asshole (or some assholes, for the tin foil hat crowd) is going to go out there and maliciously disable a cable. I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation. I mean, every hundred years, someone burns a church, or knocks over a skyscraper with a plane, or invades a country for no good reason whatsoever. Could these cables be special in that regard? For the sake of argument, lets assume they are not special and are subject to the once-in-a-hundred-year rule.

Now, we need to guess how likely it is that, if someone (or some people, for the conspiracy theorists) is indeed disabling cables maliciously, how many cables could he (or they, for the conspiracy theorists), cut per day? I'm thinking 0.5. In other words, every other day this person or people could cut a cable. The 0.5 number means that it is easy for a properly motivated entity who also has the proper means to cut cables.

Remember, there is only a 1/365 chance that a cable will be cut on any given day due to an accident. We'll need to remember this to calculate the posteriors after a cable wasn't disabled back on Day 3.

Okay, if we are all on agreement on the numbers so far, we are ready to do some Bayesian arithmetic to determine the likelihood of malicious intent.

Day 0 (before any cables disabled): 0.0001 likelihood
Day 1 (cable disabled): 0.0476644 likelihood
Day 2 (cable disabled): 0.7144896 likelihood
Day 3 (NO disabling): 0.5444762 likelihood
Day 4 (cable disabled): 0.9835428 likelihood
Day 5 (cable disabled): 0.9996654 likelihood

In conclusion, the same math that runs your spam filter predicts (99.967% likely) that someone is up to something disabling all of these cables. Conversely, we have only a 0.033% expectation that all this disabling is coincidental.