Undersea fiber-optic cables, by some estimates, are used for more than US $10 trillion in financial transactions every day, as well as encrypted defense communications and other digital communications. If one sinking ship could accidentally take out a portion of global data transmission, what could happen in an organized attack by a determined government?

Enter NATO, which has now launched a pilot project to figure out how best to protect global Internet traffic and redirect it when there's trouble. The project is called HEIST, short for hybrid space-submarine architecture ensuring infosec of telecommunications. ("Infosec" is short for "information security.")

The Houthis probably had no idea what damage they would do by attacking the Rubymar, but Western officials say there's considerable evidence that Russia and China have tried to sabotage undersea cables. As this article was going to press, two undersea cables in the Baltic Sea -- connecting Sweden with Lithuania and Finland with Germany -- had been severed, with suspicion resting on a Chinese merchant vessel in the region. Germany's defense minister, Boris Pistorius, went so far as to call the outages "sabotage."

This year and next, the organizers of HEIST say they hope to achieve at least two objectives: First, to ensure that when cables are damaged, operators will know their precise location quickly in order to mitigate disruptions. Second, the project aims to expand the number of pathways for data to travel. In particular, HEIST will be investigating ways to divert high-priority traffic to satellites in orbit.