Subsea cables are vulnerable to sabotage with potentially devastating consequences and investment is needed to better protect world connectivity from attack, a group of telecoms giants have said in an open letter.
Addressing The European Union, the United Kingdom, and NATO, a group of telecoms companies have warned of the consequences of further sabotage attacks against global data networks, what they call “subsea critical infrastructure security”. While the group commended efforts already underway to “protect critical infrastructure”, they said more needed to be done.
“The entire subsea cable ecosystem must be regarded as critical infrastructure”, they warned, stating: “The repercussions of damage to subsea cables extend far beyond Europe, potentially affecting global internet and power infrastructure, international communications, financial transactions, and critical services worldwide.”
Modern Life Under Attack: 2024 Should Have Been the Year the West Woke up to Infrastructure Sabotage https://t.co/MB4ZOQjQlH
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 2, 2025
Part of the answer, they stated, was deploying “surveillance and protection technologies” to harden networks against attacks, and to allow a more rapid response to catch perpetrators when attacks take place.
The telecoms giants that signed the letter were France’s Alcatel, Danish cable maker NKT, France Telecom’s Orange, Belgium’s Belgacom-Proximus, internet backbone giant Telecom Italia Sparkle, Spain’s Telefónica, British multinational Vodafone, and Norway’s state-owned Telenor.
While attention has been focussed on infrastructure sabotage over a spate of high-profile alleged attacks by Russan ships against subsea cables in the Baltic, Russia is not the only actor in this sphere, and a regular drumbeat of less-publicised political attacks frequently take place in Europe.
As previously reported of this phenomenon, which appears to be a particular speciality of the European hard left:
Breitbart has reported on many such instances of the hard-left attacking the basic infrastructure which does the heavy lifting for 21st century life, and railways are not an uncommon target. High-speed trains were sabotaged in Italy in 2019 by arson inside a power substation in a case, it was noted, that coincided with the court judgement on another group of left-wing extremists who were being sentenced for their role in a book shop bombing.
Although harder work and considerably more likely to cause loss of life, train derailments by the hard left have also been witnessed in recent years in Canada, with environmentalists protesting an oil pipeline by sabotaging trains carrying oil. In one case, a derailed oil train was engulfed in flames and 1.5 million litres of oil were spilt.
Data infrastructure including telephone exchanges and fibre optical cables, and supply power are also known. In 2019, a radio station and radio transmitter were burnt down in France. In 2020, 50,000 people lost internet access in the greater Paris region after telephone and data cables were cut, the culmination of a weeks-long campaign of such sabotage against information infrastructure. It was suspected the “ultra-left” could have been responsible.
In 2021, a series of apparently connected attacks were directed at telephone and internet services in France, with sabotage on several nights seeing data company work vans burnt out, fibre optic cables destroyed, and a communications tower destroyed. Left-wing actors took credit for the acts, saying in a statement: “it is not to protest against 5G in particular but in a broader context, fighting against the techno-world… We want to salute all the arsonists who are acting in the shadows at the moment and repeatedly beating this technological hell.”
There has been more of the same seen this year. In early April, the far-left was suspected in the major sabotage of a power station and nine power lines on two consecutive nights which left thousands of homes and a semiconductor factory without power. Just days later, several French cities were left totally without internet after major data cables in several different locations were cut in the same night. It was said of the timer that the coordinated strike was by “people who know the network”.
As Agence France-Presse notes, the German government is considering whether the hard-left could be responsible for Saturday’s attack.
