The senior military officer in Britain warns that the Russian navy could sever undersea communications and internet cables and do "catastrophic" economic damage, The Independent reports.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach said at the Royal United Services Institute that communications cables that run along the seabed between countries must be protected.
"Can you imagine a scenario where those cables are cut or disrupted, which would immediately and potentially catastrophically affect both our economy and other ways of living if they were disrupted," Peach said.
"Therefore we must continue to develop our maritime forces with our allies, with whom we are working very closely, to match and understand Russian fleet modernization," including "new ships and submarines" and attempts "to perfect both unconventional capabilities and information warfare."
Keir Giles, a Russian information warfare expert with the think tank Chatham House, told BBC News that concerns about Russian interference with undersea cables is not a new concern or a likely event, "but it is definitely a scenario for which they are practicing."
"The fact that people wouldn't be able to log on to Facebook would be just a tiny, tiny aspect of all the disruption that would be caused if these cables were interfered with," he added. "International trading and financial transactions are managed across sub-sea cables. The economic impact would be enormous and immediate."
Giles also said that Russia is the only nation "with an intensive program looking at ways of isolating targets from information," and that it's "probing the vulnerabilities of civilian communications infrastructure" because you can't see what they're doing underwater. You can see what they're doing on land or with satellites.
"What Russia learned from Crimea is that in order to take over communications for a target area you don't need expensive cyber weapons, you don't need noisy and disruptive techniques like denial of service attacks."