Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons Malicious Life. In April 2011, 2011, facing up to three years in prison, Hyastan Shakiryan gave an interview to reporters.

Fearfully, she claimed that she didn't even know what the internet was.

Remarkably, she might have been telling the truth.

Shukaryan was a 75-year-old pensioner from rural Georgia, not the state in the US, but the country

in eastern Europe, and there aren't many ways to make the following point without sounding a little me.

But suffice to say, Shukaryan looks like the type of person who genuinely might not know what the internet is.

Maybe she was consciously playing that up.

She'd also lied about what she was doing on her fateful day claiming to have been collecting

firewood.

Either way, Miss Chakkaryan came face to face with the internet in a way few among us ever have or will.

She was very poor and so to make some extra money she used to go digging around the countryside for copper wires.

Stealing and reselling copper from power infrastructure is illegal and dangerous, but surely one poor old lady can do that much harm on her own, right?

Well, on March 28, 2011, she ended up wandering from the forest towards a set of train tracks

in the village of Cisani, around 37 miles outside of Georgia's capital city of Tibilacy.

She dug the tracks until she hit something, a cable,

the single most important cable in the country.

Of the 552 existing and planned submarine fiber optic cables making up today's internet, few are more politically

intriguing than the Caucasus cable system. A 12.6 terabyte connection between eastern Bulgaria and Western Georgia across the Black Sea.

It alone connects Georgia to the Internet infrastructure in Europe without having to rely on some of their

more disagreeable neighbors, like, oh just a totally random example, Russia.

The Caucasus cable, of course, has to be routed to Tbilisie and beyond on land.

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