Russia’s Undersea War Games Expose Nightmare Scenario For Global Internet
Russian submarines allegedly rehearsed deploying technology designed to disable critical undersea communications cables in the Arctic this spring, raising questions about how much of modern civilization would keep functioning if a global war turned the internet’s physical backbone into a battlefield.
British, Norwegian and American forces tracked and confronted the Russian vessels near Norway’s Svalbard archipelago and prevented them from completing the exercise, Reuters reported Thursday, citing two anonymous Western officials. The alleged operation involved Russia’s Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research, known as GUGI, a secretive military organization specializing in deep-sea operations.
The alleged Russian operation adds to growing concern over how vulnerable critical infrastructure on the ocean floor could be during a wider conflict, following the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea in 2022. The pipeline explosions demonstrated the potential for underwater infrastructure to be severely damaged by sabotage, though the incident has not been attributed to Russia and investigations have increasingly focused on individuals linked to Ukraine, Reuters reported, citing German prosecutors.
An internet infrastructure expert whose research focuses on internet routing told the DCNF that the Domain Name System, or DNS, the system that translates website names into the numerical IP addresses computers use to locate one another online, is the glue holding the global information infrastructure together.
“The DNS, the name system, is dependent on the network, and while caching features heavily in the DNS, as the caches age out a connectivity cut would mean that expired data would not be refreshed and the DNS would slowly dim out and turn dark,” Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, or APNIC, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. (Read more from “Russia’s Undersea War Games Expose Nightmare Scenario For Global Internet” HERE)
