Private companies need to get better at tracking threats – POLITICO

Arelion – a Sweden-based company owned by an investment fund – runs communication cables “a network that now spans 75,000 kilometers across Europe, North America and Asia, allowing you to connect directly to more than 2,750 wholesale customers in more than 128 countries.” A perfect representative of the globalizing economy, the company has offices all over Europe (including Moscow), Asia and the USA, and its cables connecting all kinds of countries and continents are indispensable for modern economies.

However, on the morning of Sunday, November 17, one of Arelion’s cables connecting Sweden and Lithuania was cut. Of course, the company couldn’t have known anything was up until the cable suddenly stopped working. “How it broke is a mysteryArelion Chief Evangelist Mattias Fridström told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet: “But I leave that to the police.”

In a happier age of globalization, such an unexpected cable break would indeed be a mystery, as the owners and operators of the world’s approximately 600 undersea internet cables meticulously tend to their expensive installations to ensure there are no glitches. However, in a world where states seek to harm each other and countries such as Russia and China prefer to do this through non-military means, private companies suddenly find themselves at the forefront.

According to global insurance broker WTW’s 2024 political risk surveyLast year, 69 percent of participating companies experienced supply chain disruptions due to geopolitical events and 72 percent experienced political risk losses.

In many cases, companies themselves can be directly targeted. In recent months, Western logistics companies have witnessed parcel bomb plansIt is claimed that Russia provoked it. CEO of German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall became the subject of an investigation assassination attemptIt is claimed that Russia is also planning this. Western companies now worry that Chinese and Russian rivals are using nefarious methods to alienate them from mines and other operations in sub-Saharan African countries.

On the world’s high seas, owners of subsea cables, pipelines, offshore wind farms and other sea-based facilities may be finding their facilities similarly sabotaged for geopolitical purposes; in fact, this seems to have happened to Alerion as well. It also seems to have happened to Finnish owner Cinia. C-Lion1 cable connecting Finland and Germany.