Gregory Falco

Assistant professor in Cornell Engineering

Gregory Falco, assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University, is leading a NATO-funded effort to make the internet less vulnerable to disruptions like this by rerouting the flow of information to space in the event that the underwater cables are attacked or accidentally severed.

Falco says:

“The writing has been on the wall for a while now relating to subsea cable disruption. Western countries have been relying heavily on subsea infrastructure without creating robust resilience around it. Much of the challenge is the consortia-based ownership and operating structures of these subsea cables and the lack of clarity around who is responsible for protecting them in international waters – especially if companies are the owners. 

“This is exactly why we developed the HEIST project. It will provide better situational awareness for subsea cable threats, a mechanism to prioritize critical communication traffic and reroute the data to satellite communications networks in the case of disruption. With our industry partners – including SpaceX, Viasat and SES – we aim to have dynamic and resilient routing for subsea cables so that what just happened in Finland does not cause widespread disruption.”