Taiwan Strait war could lead to undersea internet cables cutoff, costly shipping disruptions: Report

originally written by Bill Gertz for The Washington Times

War between China and Taiwan could lead to a break of undersea communications cables and costly delays in moving shipping containers through the region, according to a think tank report made public Monday.

The report warns that the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army, has “planned extensively” for an invasion of the self-governed island state located about 100 miles off the Chinese mainland coast.

“The potential effects of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan on the U.S. economy are far greater than those of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” the report by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center states. “Container shipments to and from major ports in the region, as well as digital flows, would be at direct risk.”

The report is based on an open-source analysis of Chinese data revealing hundreds of potential targets, including both military facilities and key digital infrastructure such as submarine cable landing stations.

As part of an attack on Taiwan, the PLA could cut undersea cables or attack landing stations on land to disrupt both civilian and military data and communications.

The target points were identified by New Kite Data Labs, which obtained them from an unguarded Chinese internet protocol address owned by Hangzhou Alibaba Advertising Co. Ltd., identified by cybersecurity analysts as a sham internet service provider operating over a million IP addresses for third-party users.

“This evidence may indicate the kind of documentation PLA is gathering, and it underscores the risks to U.S. goods trade and digital trade with and through Taiwan in the event of a crisis in the strait,” the report said.

The IP address was linked to multiple cybersecurity incidents between Oct. 2019 and Oct. 2021 that targeted the United States, including the Mirai malware attack involving software that infected smart devices and turns them into remote “bots” that hackers used to launch large “denial of service” cyberattacks.

The Chinese database contains 294,100 points of interest or potential targets in Taiwan, with latitude, longitude, postal address, telephone numbers and other information.

Not all are likely of military interest. But spread among the database are the locations of key Taiwanese military facilities and public infrastructure that “are strategically important and vulnerable in a kinetic conflict,” the report said.

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