While the Internet at large was freaking out about an apocalyptic attack that wasn't really happening yesterday, something nefarious was going down at the bottom of the sea. Egyptian authorites found a trio of divers down there attempting to sever a crucial submarine communications cable.
Yesterday, Egypt's Coast Guard stumbled upon a suspicious fishing boat off the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. There's no word on what tipped them off, but upon investigation, they caught the team of divers up to no good and apparently mid-cut. The cable in question is owned by Egypt Telecom, the country's monopoly landline provider, making it sort of an important link in the vast network of undersea Internet connections.
So far, there's no explanation for what the divers' nefarious plan was, but it's possible they also had something to do with previously unexplained disruptions to undersea cables serving Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia over the past several days. So worry all you want about DDoS attacks, but there are physical targets for Internet attacks as well. You just have to be sort of a James Bond-style villian to get to them. [Reuters]
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Three Crazy James Bond Villains Were Caught Trying to Cut Through The Internet's Undersea Cables