Suspected attacks against undersea cables have increased since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, including several incidents in the Baltic Sea. The UN takes these acts of...
In brief: Undersea cables carry 95% of the world's internet traffic, which makes the recent increase in acts of sabotage against them so worrying. NATO and the EU have been exploring methods to detect vessels or divers near these cables, and several companies are turning to acoustic sensing as a potential solution. sabotage very seriously and formed an international organization to protect the cables in December. AP Sensing, a German developer and manufacturer, created the distributed fibre-optic sensing (DFOS) technology, which could alert officials to impending attacks on undersea cables. As reported by the BBC, when pulses of light travel along a fibre optic strand, tiny reflections sometimes bounce back along that line. The reflections are affected by acoustic vibrations, as well as factors including temperature and physical disturbance to the cable itself. A…