Researchers are urging better security for our deep-sea cables, as they claim it to be very vulnerable to threads, be it natural disasters or human factor accidents.
“As global Internet and communication links 99 per cent relies on undersea cables instead of satellite, our global economics might get choked all of a sudden if it get sabotaged” – says Alan Mauldin, an analyst at Telegeography Research.
Karl Rauscher, for Bell Labs engineer who compiled the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) publicly request for better security towards submarine cables, at the Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas, Texas, last week.
The report stated that many of the cables passing through choke points, such as the Strait of Malacca near Singapore, the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines, and the Suez Canal, are extremely vulnerable. Damage to the cables at these points could lead to phone networks becoming jammed and internet traffic slowing to a crawl, which means economy might crawl leading to many issues.
Examples would be incidents like the Howard Street tunnel running beneath downtown Baltimore, where a freight train derailed and spilled 20,000 liters of hydrochloric acid, thus destroying undersea fibre-optic cables. Other incidents like cables getting caught in fishing nets, and those that got damaged by ships’ anchors.
The report not only urge for tighter security on submarine fibre-optic cables, but also calls for new cables built on alternative routes to provide back-up to vulnerable points in the gigantic network.
0 comments:
Post a Comment