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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n
Trains stranded in remote areas for hours, mobile networks down, schools and shops plunged into darkness \u2014 the electricity blackout<\/a> that hit large parts of Spain and Portugal earlier this year had plenty of dystopian echoes.<\/p>\n Similar, more localised blackouts at Heathrow airport<\/a> and the strategic Swedish island of Gotland have also grabbed the headlines in an era of growing anxiety over the prospect of sabotage, particularly from the likes of Russia.<\/p>\n But experts say there is a less appreciated but just as serious risk in the vulnerability of Europe internet networks. Any problems with them would affect most companies and their manufacturing sites, many public services, and consumers in ways many may never have considered.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything is so interconnected in IT infrastructure, more than most people believe, maybe more than in electricity,\u201d says Patrik F\u00e4ltstr\u00f6m, chief security officer at Netnod, the Swedish group owned by a non-profit foundation that runs crucial online infrastructure around the world, including internet exchanges.<\/p>\n Netnod is sounding the alarm, believing companies and policymakers alike need to think more seriously or risk whole swaths of the economy being easily knocked out by simple cyber attacks.<\/p>\n It is clear many companies are woefully prepared. <\/p>\n \u201cIT was something for the entire IT department only. I didn\u2019t realise how wrong that was until suddenly we lost everything in a cyber attack. We ran our IT pretty efficiently, which was fine \u2014 until something went wrong,\u201d says the former chief executive of a European company hit by an attack in recent years. <\/p>\n The company itself was largely paralysed for days, and it took months to get fully back to normal.<\/p>\n A string of sabotage events recently such as the cutting of data cables<\/a> (and plenty else) in the Baltic Sea and damage to mobile masts across Sweden have highlighted the issue with many politicians across Europe worrying that the region is moving into a state somewhere between war and peace.<\/p>\n To improve resilience for societies and business alike, it cannot be just left to each organisation to act in isolation, often procuring the internet and IT according to cost, not availability under adverse scenarios. <\/p>\n Governments and companies need to think more about how they keep their essential services operating, whether through attack or natural disaster.<\/p>\n Netnod, which runs the largest internet exchange in the Nordics, has plenty of experience of helping with infrastructure in countries involved in various conflicts.<\/p>\n F\u00e4ltstr\u00f6m says one of the biggest problems is that internet users \u2014 be they private sector or government \u2014 do not tend to have a plan if they lose their main service provider. <\/p>\n So they often they often have no backup if that provider runs into trouble. <\/p>\n If that happens, the issue then becomes that the users find they have dependencies in ways that many organisations do not understand \u2014 that the operation of machinery in a plant or delivery of food to the elderly is intimately linked to the internet.<\/p>\n And there are more systemic vulnerabilities. <\/p>\n In Sweden, most of the critical internet infrastructure is centralised in Stockholm with nodes leading away from it into different parts of the country. \u201cThe network in Sweden is far too dependent on Stockholm \u2014 and it\u2019s the same in many countries,\u201d says F\u00e4ltstr\u00f6m.<\/p>\n That presents an attractive target for a malign actor, aware that they can create maximum impact with relatively limited action. What is perhaps scariest is how many of society\u2019s crucial functions \u2014 such as water, television or electricity grids themselves \u2014 who are themselves dependent on this vulnerable internet infrastructure.<\/p>\n