The explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea have increased the concern about sloppy work on the critical infrastructures of the states.
The protection police warned in the fall that the threat is also high in Finland. Finland is largely digitalized and the critical infrastructure is technical. It is used by a wide range of both private and public actors. Critical infrastructure refers to, for example, electricity and energy distribution networks and data communication connections.
Although technology companies and telecommunications operators offer cloud services to consumers, as if the internet hummed airy somewhere above our heads, the vast majority of the internet’s infrastructure is actually located underwater, at the bottom of the world’s oceans.
Undersea IT traffic cable network to be mapped of the TeleGeography company (you switch to another service) you can look at the world maps prepared by where (you switch to another service) run the 475 fiber optic cables that form the central nervous system of the intercontinental internet. The largest cable concentrations are located in the North Pacific, the North Atlantic and the coasts of Africa and Asia.
According to the map, there are a couple dozen cables between Europe and the United States, and approximately the same number between the United States and Asia.
Submarine cables carry practically all the world’s data traffic. They mediate, among other things, bank money transfers, social media content, government communications and business transactions, in other words, all modern societies depend on them.
Sea cables lead to data centers located in different parts of the world, with the help of the servers contained in them, the operation of the Internet speeds up. The majority of European data centers are located on the so-called FLAP axis, i.e. in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris. After Brexit, Frankfurt has taken London’s place as the continent’s most central data hub.
Most of the submarine cables are owned by four US technology giants: Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Investments in own cables improve companies’ cost efficiency and guarantee a network whose capacity they can increase according to their needs.
At the same time, submarine cables are strategically critical infrastructure for states, as Supokin stated. Companies and authorities handle almost everything online these days.
Finland’s longest cable leads to Germany
Finnish society is also dependent on data centers at the end of submarine cable connections. According to the experts interviewed by , even too much, that is, there is room for improvement in our country’s telecommunications self-sufficiency.
National network security advisory board your book in the summer (you switch to another service)that in the future it would be necessary to examine the cyber security of private networks in particular, and expressed his concern that the EU has developed 5G networks with commercial aspects in mind, leaving security considerations aside.
CEO of Cinia, a state-owned company that builds fiber optic networks Ari-Jussi Knaapila says that internet communication volumes currently grow by 20–40 percent per year, depending on the region.
Cinia has installed Finland’s longest submarine cable, C-Lion 1, which leads from Helsinki to Rostock, Germany. Due to the increasing data traffic, the company is already planning a second cable for the Baltic Sea region. It is also hoped that it will increase Finland’s attractiveness as a location for new data centers.
– In the early days of Cinia, there was talk that Finland could be a kind of Switzerland of data, i.e. a peaceful area where information safe havens could be located, says Knaapila.
A significant part of Finland’s data traffic travels on Cinia’s submarine cable. CEO Knaapila cannot tell about his customers, but says that the ratio between private operators and public sector customers is about 60/40 percent.
C-Lion 1 has a capacity of approximately 190 terabytes, making it one of the world’s most broadband submarine cables. The cable is buried one meter deep in the bottom mud of the Baltic Sea, and its route follows the line of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, at a distance of a few hundred meters from it.
At the beginning of Cinia, it was said that Finland could be a kind of Switzerland of data.
Ari-Jussi Knaapila
– The cable has eight fiber pairs and one fiber pair could carry 2.5 million simultaneous HDTV broadcasts, i.e. all households in Finland. And you can tell this by eight, says Knaapila.
All in all, there are a dozen undersea communication cables running from Finland to the Western world. In addition to Germany, they export to Sweden and the Baltics. The location of every submarine cable in the world is easy to determine, as they are marked on nautical charts, excluding the secret networks of the defense forces.
A hybrid strike could be crippling
If, for example, the cable connections from Finland to Sweden and Germany were to be cut off, Finland would become pretty much a lame duck, according to CEO Ari-Jussi Knaapila. The effects can mostly be imagined by everyone themselves.
In addition to the fact that the operation of many regular online services would be compromised, some critical functions could also be threatened.
– At some point, we threw even critical services into public clouds with a fairly free hand. And when something is placed in the public cloud, you lose control over it. We have had a lot of blue-eyedness in us, which has recently been revealed, says Knaapila.
Knaapila does not reveal in more detail which critical functions he means. By public cloud service, he refers to a virtual space available via the public internet, where everyone can store their data.
The security director of the state’s information and communication technology center Valtori agrees with the threat images of telecommunications Hannu Naumanen. He says that he can’t even imagine the overall picture of a situation where submarine cables would fall out of use.
– If there were no communication connections from Finland to other countries, the impact would be immediate and significant, says Naumanen.
At the same time, he has a reassuring message. The state has a number of on-premise data centers located on Finnish soil, through which at least part of the public administration’s critical information traffic could be handled.
– We have solutions in our country within the framework of which we would be able to operate with regard to critical operators, Naumanen says.
According to him, information about the capacities and users of these servers is not public.
If there were no communication connections from Finland to other countries, the impact would be immediate and significant.
Hannu Naumanen
Finland’s cyber security authorities, at least so far, have not seen the need to gather information about which public administration entities use servers located abroad. Special expert at the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom’s cyber security center Marko Kotilainen tells by e-mail that at least Traficom does not have such information.
– Traficom has not collected information about the locations of public administration or public operators’ servers abroad. Each actor decides on the implementation of his services himself, Kotilainen writes.
For example, uses servers located in Ireland and Germany, which means that if the sea connections are interrupted, ‘s online service will probably experience interruptions or disturbances. In this case, the meanings of radio and television would be emphasized, as well as ‘s back-up service, which runs entirely domestically on the Internet (you switch to another service). However, its use also requires the consumer to have a terminal device connected to the network.
– The actual disruptions in a serious international telecommunications problem situation would mainly remain a problem of video streams. We spend a lot of time planning that under no circumstances will a situation arise where is unable to publish anything, says ‘s information security manager Kim Johansson.
Former NATO commander: Russia’s interest in cables has increased
Although it is unlikely to cut all the itc cables in the Baltic Sea, NATO takes threats to critical infrastructures seriously. The organization strengthened the presence of its fleet in both the Baltic and North Seas after the Nord Stream attack, and the Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg hybrid or cyber attacks could trigger the use of Article 5, i.e. military alliance-level countermeasures.
At the beginning of the year, the authorities in NATO country Norway suspected that a Russian ship had damaged the sea cable leading from Lofoten to Väipupvuori. At the time, the authorities complained that the preparations for sabotage could not be interfered with, because the maritime law inherited from the 19th century does not provide the means to do so.
British professor specializing in new technology John Naughton wrote recently (you are switching to another service) In The Guardian magazine, that Russia could isolate the United States from the rest of the world if it wanted to by cutting off its underwater communications. Naughton speculated that as the military success on the front weakened, the Russian military leadership might turn its attention elsewhere, such as infrastructure critical to the West.
At sea, they are as thin as garden hoses.
John Naughton
– Cables are usually led into the sea from weakly protected points. On the coast they are protected by special reinforcement, but at sea they are as thin as garden hoses, Naughton wrote.
Naughton noted the former NATO commander by James Stavridis said that Russian submarines have recently begun to closely monitor the cable network located in the depths of the North Atlantic. One of the Russian submarines was located at the end of September on the western edge of Europe, on the coast of Brittany.
Since submarine cables are privately owned, governments have so far left them alone. But now, according to the NATO commander, the situation may be changing, says Naughton.
– Stavridis has written the book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, in which a Russian ship cuts 30 submarine cables, thus isolating the United States from the world. I don’t think the president Vladimir Putin has read the book, but I think that [Venäjän asevoimien pääesikunnan päällikkö] Valery Gerasimov is, Naughton stated.
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