Report: Undersea Telecoms Cables Face Growing Risks

A Reuters newswire article, via Epicenter, reports:

Investors should urgently diversify the web of undersea cables that serve as the world’s information and banking arteries to address soaring demand and piracy concerns and reduce the risk of catastrophic outages.

So says a report by a multinational research project that calls for the building of global backup routes for the submarine network that carries almost all international communications, including financial transactions and Internet traffic.

The report’s main author, Karl Rauscher of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an international professional body, told Reuters changes should be made “before we have to learn the hard way.”

“This report is trying to have a September 10 mindset, where you actually do something about what you know on September 10 to avoid a September 11 situation,” Rauscher, who was an adviser to the U.S. government on cyber security after the September 11 attacks, said.

An executive summary of the report made available to Reuters says that the current probability of a global or regional failure of the network is very low, but is “not zero.”

More here.