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Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

(www.cnn.com)
577 points mooreds | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 14:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ct520 ◴[19 Nov 24 05:12 UTC] No.42180260[source]▶
Dumb question but my assumption is fiber optic cables could be “tapped”? But the disruption would be noticeable when monitoring the cable. Could you just tap it when you cut it and when it hooked back up that’s the new baseline with the tap in place? That would seem more of a logical reason then a country just randomly cutting lines to me?
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jillesvangurp ◴[19 Nov 24 05:34 UTC] No.42180345[source]▶
Most/all of the traffic would be encrypted.
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donalhunt ◴[19 Nov 24 07:48 UTC] No.42180914[source]▶
That wasn't the case in the past. Events over the past 15 years have resulted in most companies encrypting all traffic between datacenters (due to the perceived risk). TLS between consumers and companies is probably at an all time high though due to a push for end-to-end encryption.
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1. picohik ◴[19 Nov 24 08:25 UTC] No.42181120[source]▶
These things get encrypted at a lower layer, macsec. At the transport layer it's all transparent. No need for TLS between your servers, that's just wasted overhead.

You typically encrypt anyway because you just lease the line and buy the b/w. It's operated by a different company and you share the wire with other customers.