Russian Spy Ship Yantar Loitering Near Trans-Atlantic Internet Cables | Hacker News Reader

Russian Spy Ship Yantar Loitering Near Trans-Atlantic Internet Cables

navalnews.com

35 pointstriple_m13 comments

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Probably just messing with the NSA taps. Spooks being spooks.

Or, far more likely, creating their own.

They could also insert some kind of remote detonation device so the cables can be cut in case of war.

Tapping the cables is so last season, everyone knows about it and should use encryption.

Could ships like this actually tamper with the cables without causing interruption that someone else would notice?

Isolate a single fiber, bend it slightly beyond its bend radius, measure the light that escapes. This will appear as a slight reduction in signal strength, but won't be conclusively identifiable as a tap. https://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/tap-fiber.html

This is interesting, thanks for the link!

It seems to be happening for a pretty long time (at least the 1970s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

follow up read

Interception Capabilities 2000, Submarine cable interception

https://fas.org/irp/eprint/ic2000/ic2000.htm#_Toc448565536

You should read 'Blind Mans Bluff' - its about US submarines doing exactly that about 30 years ago.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espiona...

For the Celtic - Norse cable now is probably the ideal time to tap it as it does not appear to be operational yet. For other cables brining them down with some strategic use of an anchor and tapping before it is repaired would probably be very tricky to detect.

Very sophisticated work. Not impossible.

I expect at some point that ship'll meet with an unfortunate 'accident'.

they should just publicly give a feed from these cables so anyone can see it without tapping in. It should all be encrypted anyway. One anyone can see the traffic the unencrypted would get encrypted pretty fast

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