Snapped undersea cables off the coast of Egypt have cut bandwidth in India to half its normal capacity. Users from Bangladesh to Egypt have been affected, and even Dubai's stock exchange experienced some problems late Wednesday. Big companies with backup plans probably won't be hurt too badly, but the outsourcing industry could experience some hiccups, as all those administrative and customer-service-related tasks could slow.
Officials aren't sure what caused the damage, though a ship's anchor was cited as a possibility.
We are used to thinking of security in terms of physical geography. Rivers, mountains, railroads, oases in the desert, sea choke points, etc. Now add Internet links to the list. And India just got a lesson in one of their vulnerabilities.
And for those who insist that the Internet is too robust to be physically attacked, when an accident can cause hiccups in a local area, why wouldn't an intelligently designed attack do even more damage, even if on a local scale? And if your target is a local area, wouldn't such an effect be even better than trying to hit one nation by knocking down the planet's web?
Nations build alliances and bases to protect their physical geography. Will we see a country seek alliances and bases to protect their Internet linkages? While it would seem to be far more cost-effective to build alternate linkages, at some point, you still have a finite number of critical nodes that a determined enemy could attack. I'm not sure that redundancy will end the possible need to defend at least some of those nodes.
UPDATE: Instapundit notes these comments on the Internet's global cable network. With a map as well. So what would a base to protect Internet cables look like? Would such a "base" just be an office with people who monitor the cables and keep companies capable of repairing them on retainer? Would it have submarines or divers? Special forces? Private contractor security people? Does it even make sense to defend these critical Internet chokepoints?
