{"id":209,"date":"2025-07-14T15:46:52","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T15:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/?p=209"},"modified":"2025-07-14T15:46:52","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T15:46:52","slug":"financial-institutions-should-prepare-for-subsea-cable-sabotage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/?p=209","title":{"rendered":"Financial institutions should prepare for subsea cable sabotage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Stay informed with free updates<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description o3-type-body-base\"><span>Simply sign up to the <!-- -->Cyber Security<!-- --> myFT Digest &#8212; delivered directly to your inbox.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=cf16a5b4-6961-4b6c-80fb-6238b73338bd&amp;concept-id=146af07b-ba26-4293-9aa8-d900930ac78f\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p><em>The writer is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and advises Gallos Technologies<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A string of mysterious undersea cable incidents is spooking governments and Nato. But they should spook another group too: the financial services industry. If several cables connecting Britain or the US east coast were severed, the City of London and Wall Street would face colossal disruption and losses. Both London and New York should prepare for it.<\/p>\n<p>On Christmas Day last year, the Cook Islands-flagged tanker Eagle S hit five cables in the Gulf of Finland. Had the Finnish Border Guard not boarded the tanker, which belongs to Russia\u2019s so-called shadow fleet, the destruction could have been even worse. The cables\u2019 operators closely followed the developments \u2014 and so did Jaakko Weuro, the head of Finland\u2019s Financial Stability Authority (RVV).<\/p>\n<p>RVV, established in 2015 to protect taxpayers from the effects of financial crises and to prevent financial crises, is not in charge of undersea infrastructure. But money travels through the world\u2019s more than 500 data cables \u2014 some $10tn of it every single day. <\/p>\n<p>Weuro knew that if the Eagle S had hit more cables before the Border Guard intervened, Finland\u2019s financial stability could have been shaken. Since 2022, Finland has been working to set up a rudimentary system ensuring payments in case of a blackout.<\/p>\n<p>But most other countries don\u2019t even have a Finnish-style backup. \u201cWe need the cables,\u201d Weuro told me. \u201cWe can\u2019t replace them with satellites.\u201d Compared to undersea cables, satellites are costly and cumbersome. No wonder the workhorses of the ocean carry 99 per cent of all internet traffic, including virtually all financial transactions.<\/p>\n<p>If the cable system fails, what do we do? There is no clear answer. London and New York, too, are profoundly dependent on the cables. The coasts off these two cities just happen to be hubs for the cables connecting the UK with Europe and the east coast of the US with Europe, which makes them even more attractive for sabotage. <\/p>\n<p>Undersea cables use a redundancy model: if one cable is damaged, its \u201ctwin\u201d automatically takes over its traffic. But what would happen if a whole string of cables were damaged at the same time? Even a disruption of a few minutes would cause massive damage to financial institutions. <\/p>\n<p>Who would pay for the loss if, say, a \u00a3100mn transaction were halted because a mysterious ship hit the cable executing the transaction and the backup cable had been damaged too? Under the best of circumstances, repairing a data cable takes several days. <\/p>\n<p>Banking bosses in London and New York should demonstrate preparedness for a cable outage much as they prepare contingency plans for a major cyber attack or another global financial crisis. We stress-test for the latter two; the Bank of England conducts the industry-wide SIMEX exercises involving infrastructure faults demanding a reset, and the US Sheltered Harbor allows banks to maintain basic operations after a cyber incident. <\/p>\n<p>But in the event of a subsea cable outage, we would \u2014 so to speak \u2014 be at sea. \u201cMoney affected by a cable outage might not be ultimately lost, but it could distort the market,\u201d Weuro reflected. \u201cThere would be winners and losers. What if a bank loses so much money that it imperils the viability of the country\u2019s financial system? And because we don\u2019t have experience with such an event, we don\u2019t know how long it would take to recover and how to plan for such an event.\u201d In the meantime, he continues to build Finland\u2019s Plan B. <\/p>\n<p>Planning how to respond to such devastation in both hubs of the global financial system is essential. It would have to involve not just banks but governments, cable operators, underwriters and cable-repair firms too. Those who prepare will be better off than those who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>#Financial #institutions #prepare #subsea #cable #sabotage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Cyber Security myFT Digest &#8212; delivered directly to your inbox. The writer is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and advises Gallos Technologies A string of mysterious undersea cable incidents is spooking governments and Nato. But they should spook another group too: the financial [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[291,226,288,289,292,290],"class_list":{"0":"post-209","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-cable","9":"tag-financial","10":"tag-institutions","11":"tag-prepare","12":"tag-sabotage","13":"tag-subsea"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}