Rising tensions in Europe as a fiber-optic cable was cut between Germany and Finland. Via Gizmodo:
On Monday, an undersea data cable connecting Germany and Finland was cut. On Tuesday, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said the damage was no accident. “We have to conclude, without knowing exactly who did it, that it is a hybrid action and we also have to assume—without knowing it—that it is sabotage,” Pistorious told journalists during a press conference.
The cable is called C-Lion1 and it runs 728 miles between Helsinki and Rockstock. It’s buried 3 feet into the seabed and would have been difficult to cut by accident. When it was laid down in 2016, it broke data speed records. The cable, just by itself, could enable everyone in Finland to jump on a 25Mbps internet connection at the same time.
Now it’s in pieces on the sea floor. Samuli Bergström, a communications chief at the Finnish National Cyber Security Center Traficom, said that there are a lot of connections running between Finland and the rest of the world. “It is good to keep in mind that data connections out of Finland go from several different places,” he told DW. “Now one of these connections is broken, which may burden others [but the effects are] probably not visible to the average citizen.”
Europe has stopped short of blaming Russia directly for a similar 2022 attack on the cable, but many governments in the region believe Putin is responsible.
On Monday, the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. issued a joint declaration that called out Moscow. “Russia is systematically attacking European security architecture,” the declaration said. “Moscow’s escalating hybrid activities against NATO and EU countries are also unprecedented in their variety and scale, creating significant security risks.”