Don’t you hate being late to the party? The shrimp is gone, the champagne is warm, and there is only dark meat left on the turkey platter.

Earlier this month Google, Meta and other companies that rely heavily on the Internet were warned by the government that fiber optic cables running under the pacific ocean could be intentionally compromised by countries looking to disrupt the flow of data between the US and Asia.

The State Department has pointed out that unfriendly nations could be behind any tampering of cables carrying industry and military data. We are shocked!

This past March it was reported that underwater cables in the Red Sea had been tampered with. The result was considerable damage to Internet services causing providers to divert traffic between Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Again, shocking.

“What’s amazing to us is that just about anyone trying to access their data in the cloud has to start at the bottom of the ocean. 

The fact is there are about 380 fiber optic cables covering 750,000 miles of ocean floor that connect most of the world to the Internet.

Most of these cables are owned by the same players dominating the clouds.

There are about 91 such cables coming in and out of the United States. Some countries have one cable supplying all of their Internet service. Scary.”

The above is a quote from a blog we posted in March 2020 titled “The Spade Hacker.”

The blog was basically about how easily these fiber optic cables could be compromised:

“In the Republic of Georgia, located on the Europe-Asia border, a 75-year-old woman, digging for copper with a sharp-edged shovel, cut through one of these fiber optic cables.

The entire country of Armenia, as well as parts of Georgia and Azerbaijan were cut off from the Internet.”

So an elderly woman was able to take down the Internet with a spade! This incident occurred in 2011. We wrote about it in 2020 and it is only recently that the government started warning big tech companies about the ease in which these cables can be compromised.

In the 2020 blog we posted:

“If a 75-year-old woman can hack through a cable with a spade and bring down the Internet in three countries, it seems there has to be a more secure way of doing things. But apparently not.”

Four years later, “apparently not” still seems to be appropriate. 

From what we’ve read, it seems securing these extremely important underwater cables is based on trust and transparency. Not sure, when it comes to protecting the world’s data, we should be relying on what amounts to be “the honor system.”

To quote what we wrote in that blog four years ago: “Scary.”