Hiding in the noise: How ‘accidental’ cable cuts conceal a new front in gray-zone warfare

WASHINGTON – The global internet breaks underwater roughly 150 to 200 times a year. For decades, the telecom industry has treated these outages as the inevitable cost of doing business in a crowded ocean – attributing the vast majority of damage to fishing nets, dragging anchors or natural disasters.

But new data from the Taiwan Strait suggests that this background “noise” of accidental disruptions is now providing the perfect camouflage for targeted sabotage.

According to Alex Botting, senior director at Venable and a fellow at the Center for Cybersecurity Policy and Law, Taiwan experienced a statistically improbable spike in infrastructure damage earlier this year that defies standard explanations.

“There were more cable cuts in the Taiwan Strait in January of this year than either 2024 or 2023 in total,” Botting said in a recent interview on the McCrary Institute’s Cyber Focus podcast. “That is a sharp uplift at a time when we know that hostility in that part of the world is rising. I would be shocked if none of those incidents were knowingly done.” 

The perfect camouflage

The vulnerability of the global subsea network lies not in its technology, but in its operational protocols. Roughly 70% of cable faults are categorized as “accidental.” Because the priority for telecom operators is restoring service to maintain global connectivity, the industry standard is to repair the fault immediately rather than conduct a forensic investigation.

“Downtime of a cable is more costly than repairing the cable,” Botting explained. “Unless you’re doing this to me every day, there’s no reason for me to suspect anything.” 

This economic incentive creates a national security blind spot. By categorizing disruptions as accidents without investigation, nations can mask low-level sabotage as negligence, maintaining “plausible deniability” while degrading an adversary’s connectivity.

Misplaced fears

While policymakers focus on the threat of foreign spies tapping cables to intercept data, Botting argues this fear is largely misplaced. Tapping a modern subsea cable is logistically nightmarish. To store just one year of data from a single cable, an adversary would need to build data centers covering the equivalent of “two or three Central Parks.”

“Do I think the juice is worth the squeeze? No, I don’t,” Botting said, estimating the cost of such an operation in the “tens of billions.”

The real danger is simply availability – cutting the line entirely. This risk is amplified by the AI boom, as data centers increasingly rely on subsea connectivity. “A data center without connectivity is just a warehouse,” Botting noted.

Closing the blind spot

Botting points to “fiber sensing” – using light signals to detect physical contact with the cable – as a key emerging tool.When combined with acoustic sensors, this technology could eventually identify the specific “fingerprint” of a vessel, stripping away the anonymity of open ocean sabotage.

But technology alone isn’t enough. Botting argues that investigating the “accidents” is essential to removing the cover for sabotage.

Doing that reduces “the number of incidents that occur,” Botting said. “It’s also great if you believe somebody might come to try and sabotage your cables in the future because there’s less cloak of plausible deniability that they can hide behind.”

Watch the full episode here.