Slashdot Mirror
Russian Presence Near Undersea Cables Concerns US (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports that the presence of Russian ships near important, undersea internet cables is raising concern with U.S. military and intelligence officials. From the article: "The issue goes beyond old Cold War worries that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West's governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.
...
Just last month, the Russian spy ship Yantar, equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersible craft, cruised slowly off the East Coast of the United States on its way to Cuba — where one major cable lands near the American naval station at Guantánamo Bay. It was monitored constantly by American spy satellites, ships and planes. Navy officials said the Yantar and the submersible vehicles it can drop off its decks have the capability to cut cables miles down in the sea. What worries Pentagon planners most is that the Russians appear to be looking for vulnerabilities at much greater depths, where the cables are hard to monitor and breaks are hard to find and repair.
...
Just last month, the Russian spy ship Yantar, equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersible craft, cruised slowly off the East Coast of the United States on its way to Cuba — where one major cable lands near the American naval station at Guantánamo Bay. It was monitored constantly by American spy satellites, ships and planes. Navy officials said the Yantar and the submersible vehicles it can drop off its decks have the capability to cut cables miles down in the sea. What worries Pentagon planners most is that the Russians appear to be looking for vulnerabilities at much greater depths, where the cables are hard to monitor and breaks are hard to find and repair.
But there was an internet outage about two weeks ago, and it went unreported because it seemed to be a simple outage. It happened before 7AM, and early customers at our laundromat could not access their prepaid online balances. The TV only showed an unusual white-box error message about technical difficulties. The Russians had just resumed bombing supposed ISIS targets.
The outage was early enough not to be noticed; it was about 5 minutes to 7 AM Eastern. What was cause for concern was for how long it lasted, almost 20 minutes of cell phone downtime. And no CNN even local news on our FIOS-enabled in-house network.
Anybody can bring down the net. But not just anybody can keep it down for so long. This is where I almost regret reading too many books or too many news items.
Not even Slashdot noticed anything; it was too early in the day.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
He's not a troll, he's a Likho. Putin would never resort to using inferior western mythological creatures!
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."