Cable Landing Station Security: Where the Internet Lands
When people picture the internet, they picture data centers, towers and glowing screens. They rarely picture a modest building near a beach, behind a chain-link fence, at the end of a quiet road.
But that's where the internet physically arrives. Commercial undersea cables carry about 99% of transoceanic digital communications, according to the Congressional Research Service. Every one of those cables has to come ashore somewhere, and the place it does is a cable landing station. If one goes dark, traffic reroutes at best, and degrades or stops at worst. That makes cable landing station security one of the most important and least discussed jobs in critical infrastructure. This article covers why these sites are hard to protect, what the threat picture looks like, what regulators now expect, and how autonomous drone patrols can help.
Why Cable Landing Station Security Matters Now
Start with the scale. The International Cable Protection Committee says the global network includes roughly 500 cable systems and about 1.8 million kilometers of cable. These systems connect continents, cloud regions, financial markets and governments.
The U.S. portion is concentrated. CRS counted 85 licensed cable landing stations in operation or planned as of May 2023, up from 52 in 2004. They cluster on the Northeast coast from Massachusetts through New Jersey, in Southeast Florida, and along the West Coast in Washington, Oregon and California. A cluster is efficient for the industry. It also means a single regional event can touch many cables at once.
CRS describes cable landing stations as "the most accessible and impact-rich targets" for intentional attacks, mostly because they sit on the coast. A cable on the seabed is hard to reach. A building on land isn't.
What Makes a Cable Landing Station Hard to Protect
On paper, a landing station looks simple. In practice, several things work against it.
It's often small and quiet. Many stations are compact facilities with limited staff, especially overnight. Quiet is good for operations. It's less good for security.
It's coastal. Salt air, fog, wind and darkness make traditional camera systems harder to rely on. Shoreline approaches are difficult to watch from a single fixed point.
It's a long perimeter, not a single door. Fence lines, access roads, the route cables take from the shore to the building, and the property edges all count. Walking that regularly takes time that small teams don't have.
It's a choke point. When many systems land in the same area, an outage doesn't stay local. The impact reaches far beyond the property line.
Ownership and oversight are fragmented. A DHS white paper noted that the subsea cable industry "does not fit cleanly within existing U.S. government mechanisms," and that U.S. cable landing approvals now average more than three years. Responsibility for protection is shared across operators, licensees, landowners and agencies.
The Threat Picture: Accidents, Sabotage and Gray-Zone Pressure
Most cable damage isn't malicious. ICPC says about 150 to 200 cable faults occur globally each year, and roughly 70% to 80% come from accidental human activity, mainly commercial fishing and ship anchors. Natural hazards and equipment failures account for most of the rest.
But the intentional category has moved from theory to headlines. Al Jazeera reported in 2025 that at least 11 cases of undersea cable damage had occurred around Taiwan, and at least 11 in the Baltic Sea, since 2023. Experts quoted in that reporting said the hard part is proving intent. A ship drags an anchor, a cable breaks, and the cause looks like an accident. As one analyst put it, a bad actor can break a cable by making it look like one of the accidents that commonly cause breaks.
Here's the point for anyone responsible for a landing station. Most of the documented damage happens at sea, where an operator has little control. The land side is different. It's a fixed, known location on private or leased property, and it's where an operator can actually act. If an adversary, a criminal or a careless trespasser wants to cause disruption, the shore end is a far easier target than the ocean floor.
The realistic land-side risks include:
Trespass and vandalism at fences, gates and equipment.
Theft of copper, batteries, fuel and tools, which can cause outages even without any intent to disrupt.
Surveillance of the site by people studying access, staffing and routines.
Unauthorized drones overflying the property to look inside the fence.
Insider or contractor access issues, where legitimate access is misused.
None of these are exotic. They're the same problems every remote, high-value facility has. What's different is the consequence.
What the Rules Now Expect From Cable Landing Station Security
Regulators have started to treat landing sites as national security assets. In 2025, the FCC adopted new submarine cable landing license rules. According to Greenberg Traurig's summary, applicants and licensees must certify they have implemented a cybersecurity and physical security risk management plan that addresses logical, physical and supply chain risks. The rules also restrict who can install, own or manage key terminal equipment on cables landing in the United States.
That language matters. A plan on paper isn't enough. A licensee that certifies a physical security risk management plan needs to show the plan works in practice. That means knowing what's happening at the site in between inspections, not only on the day the auditor shows up.
How Autonomous Drone Patrols Support Cable Landing Station Security
Autonomous patrols fit this problem well, because the problem is mostly about coverage across a coastal perimeter with few people on site.
In a fully managed program like ours, the drone launches, flies and lands on an automated route. AI-assisted detection flags people, vehicles and unusual activity, and trained pilots supervise. For a landing station, that translates into several practical benefits.
Regular perimeter coverage. Scheduled flights cover the fence line, the access road and the approaches from the shore, including areas fixed cameras don't see. Varying the timing keeps the pattern from becoming predictable.
Alarm verification. When a sensor trips, a drone can show what's actually there. Is it wildlife, a tide worker, or someone cutting a fence? That cuts false alarms and speeds up the right response.
Night and low-light awareness. Coastal sites are dark much of the time. Thermal and low-light payloads help detect people and vehicles when visual cameras struggle.
A baseline of normal. Patrol footage builds a record of how the site looks week after week. Changes such as new tire tracks, a damaged gate or a vehicle that keeps returning stand out against that baseline.
Documentation. Time-stamped records support incident reporting and give investigators something to work with. They also help show regulators that a physical security plan is more than paperwork.
Airspace awareness. Counter-drone detection, like our AirGuard service, adds monitoring for unauthorized aircraft over the property.
BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) authorization is what makes this practical at scale. LandSkyAI holds BVLOS authorizations in the United States and has completed more than 100,000 drone patrols, so a small operations team can supervise flights without keeping each aircraft in direct sight.
What Drones Can't Do
We'd rather be direct about the limits.
They don't secure the subsea segment. Cables on the seabed need maritime domain awareness, route planning and international coordination. Drone patrols cover the land side.
They aren't a substitute for hardening. Fencing, access control, lighting, cameras and building protections still matter. Drones add detection and verification on top.
They don't handle cyber risk. The FCC's rules cover logical and supply chain risks too. Physical patrols address one part of the picture.
Weather and airspace constrain flights. Fog, high wind and coastal storms can ground aircraft, and some shorelines sit near ports, airports or restricted areas. A good program plans for that and layers in other controls.
Someone still has to respond. A drone gives you better information, faster. Action still comes from your people or local responders.
Done well, drones fill a specific gap: eyes across a long, quiet coastal perimeter, around the clock.
Why LandSkyAI for Cable Landing Station Security
Operators of critical communications infrastructure shouldn't have to build an aviation department to get better coverage. LandSkyAI runs fully managed autonomous drone and robotic security, so the aircraft, automation, pilots and reporting are handled for you. We're hardware agnostic, so we match the platform to your site and conditions.
Landing stations are sensitive sites, so we start with your risk plan and your property, not a generic package.
Ready to Strengthen Your Landing Station Perimeter?
If you operate, own or license a cable landing station, we'd like to walk through your site with you. We'll look at your perimeter, your coverage gaps and your regulatory obligations, and show where autonomous patrols would help and where they wouldn't.
Did you find this article useful? Are you interested in seeing us in action?
MissionControl is LandSkyAI’s ongoing town hall style webinar where you can get to know who we are, what we do, and how we’ve built our autonomous security programs. We also conduct a fully live remote drone demo, every time!
Our next event is on Wednesday, October 28th, 2026
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