Norway is bolstering its security of undersea cables after the recent sabotage of the underwater Nord Stream pipeline system exposed critical vulnerabilities.
The Norwegian government announced it is boosting security around vulnerable undersea fiber optic cables.
The cables are vital to the country’s oil and gas production.
Officials said the country is taking action due to the recent explosions of the Nord Stream pipelines being found to be an act of sabotage.
On Tuesday, Norway’s communications regulator Nkom said that it will allocate an additional $4.4 million for new technology that will help monitor key stretches of submarine fiber cable and identify potential threats.
According to Nkom, the funds will also be used to buy equipment that can detect disturbances to satellite-based services like GPS on the Norwegian continental shelf as disruptions can pose challenges to multiple industries.
“With these measures, the government will strengthen security on the Norwegian continental shelf, both when it comes to the outcome of telecom services and the prevention and handling of possible threats,” Norway’s Minister for Municipalities and Districts, Sigbjørn Gjelsvik, said in a statement.
Norway’s beefed-up security measures for critical infrastructure follow recent findings by Swedish investigators probing damage to the two Nord Stream pipelines that link Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea after powerful explosions in late September led to four ruptures.
While the explosions had little immediate impact on Europe’s energy security, experts have warned that there are few protections in place for submarine data infrastructure.
“Seventy percent of all energy in the world is either found at sea or moves by sea, and 93 percent of all data in the world moves by undersea cables,” Bruce Jones, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, told Foreign Policy.
“We have very limited protections for either of those things.”
Investigators have found traces of explosive material at the Nord Stream blast sites.
On November 18, the Swedish Security Service stated that the incident was an act of “serious sabotage.”
Crime scene investigators found “foreign objects” at the blast sites and, after analyzing them, found traces of explosives, the Swedish Security Service said.
More advanced analyses are being carried out on the foreign objects to draw more conclusions about the incident, the security service stated, calling the investigation “extensive and complex.”
“What happened in the Baltic Sea is very serious,” the agency stated.
The Swedish Prosecutor’s Office issued a similar statement confirming that the blasts were an act of sabotage.
While sabotage has long been suspected as the cause of the ruptures, speculation continues to swirl around who could be behind the blasts.
The United States and its European allies have denied involvement while suggesting that Russia might be involved.
The Kremlin has called such allegations “predictably stupid,” as the pipelines are Russian-owned and the natural gas inside them comes from Russia.
Russia has long blamed the West for the blasts and, in late October, accused the British navy of blowing up the pipelines.
London has dismissed Moscow’s accusations as false and designed to distract from Russian military setbacks in Ukraine.
The ruptures occurred in the midst of an energy standoff between Russia and the European Union amid the war in Ukraine, with the West accusing Moscow of weaponizing energy to gain leverage in the conflict.
The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines have a joint annual capacity of 110 billion cubic meters, which is more than half of Russia’s normal natural gas export volumes.
The EU, which in recent years has become highly dependent on Russian energy flows, is facing an energy price crunch as it struggles to replace those supplies from other sources.
