Yahoo Finance French Olympic Security Tripped Up by Attacks Outside of Paris
(Bloomberg) -- During the Olympics, Paris has become a maximum security-site on high alert for potential terrorist attacks. Instead, saboteurs attempted to knock out train and internet infrastructure. Both incidents involved fiber optic cables.
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Attacks on France’s high-speed railway hours before the opening ceremony on Friday targeted signaling cables. Then, overnight Sunday across France, cables in multiple locations carrying broadband service were cut.
“They’ve put a very effective ring around Paris and you look for the very soft underbelly, and that’s everything outside Paris,” said Dale Buckner, Chief Executive Officer of security firm Global Guardian.
Unlike previous attacks on infrastructure, the scale and coordination has taken authorities by surprise. “What’s striking is the geographical scale of these cuts, which happened in nine different departments” said Romain Bonenfant, head of the French Telecom Federation, stretching from the north of Paris to the Mediterranean Sea.
France has about 35,000 kilometers (21,748 miles) of railway tracks and a vast network of long-distance internet cables, with 120,000 kilometers for SFR alone, the carrier that was especially targeted. While maintenance workers have worked hard to minimize the disruption, authorities have claimed that protecting thousands of miles of key infrastructure is an uphill task.
“It’s impossible to monitor all 35,000 kilometers,” Jean-Pierre Farandou told reporters on Saturday at Gare Montparnasse, the station most affected by Friday’s attack. The culprits have yet to be identified for either incident.
The feeling was echoed by the telecoms industry. “There will be investigations, but this is vandalism, and most probably sabotage,” said Bonenfant. “You can’t put surveillance on every part of it.”
Fiber optic cables have become the lifelines for national infrastructure. Over the past two decades, governments have spent billions updating communication networks to run on ultra-fast cables. However, protecting this investment has often not been a priority.
In France, long-distance fiber optic cables typically run through underground pipes, only accessible through access hatches. In some cases, these cables run along train lines and rivers.
“If you know where these strategic cables are, accessing and cutting them is not very complicated with the right tools,” said Arthur Laudrain, postdoctoral Research Associate in Cyber Diplomacy at King’s College London. “It is difficult to secure these cables effectively, given the number of physical access points used for maintenance.”
France is versed in both attacks on its infrastructure and investigations that fail to catch the perpetrators. In 2022, multiple fiber optic cables were cut leading to internet outages in Paris, Lyon, Reims, Grenoble, and Bordeaux. The attackers targeted specific cables that connected Paris to other locations in France. A man was arrested, but later found to be a repairman.
A year later, an attacker set fire to an electric cable box just outside of Paris, causing days of disruption to a high-speed train line. In both cases, the culprits were never found.
The attacks come at a time when Paris has been turned into a maximum-security venue, and authorities have been vocal to show the efforts they have taken to make the French capital safe for the Olympics. Background checks on about 1 million people involved in the Games resulted in around 1,000 of them being suspected of potential espionage, interior minister Gérald Darmanin said last week, according to a report from AFP.
About 50 activists from environmental movement Extinction Rebellion were arrested on Saturday morning, who were planning either “sabotage or radical protest acts” in Paris during the first events of the games, Darmanin said.
A team of 50 investigators have opened a criminal probe into the rail attacks and an investigation has also now begun into internet cable sabotage but for now prosecutors are saying little to indicate if it’s the work of anarchists from the French far-left or ordered-up from abroad.
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