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Russia To Disconnect From the Internet as Part of a Planned Test (zdnet.com)
Russian authorities and major internet providers are planning to disconnect the country from the internet as part of a planned experiment, Russian news agency RosBiznesKonsalting (RBK) reports. From a report: The reason for the experiment is to gather insight and provide feedback and modifications to a proposed law introduced in the Russian Parliament in December 2018. A first draft of the law mandated that Russian internet providers should ensure the independence of the Russian internet space (Runet) in the case of foreign aggression to disconnect the country from the rest of the internet. In addition, Russian telecom firms would also have to install "technical means" to re-route all Russian internet traffic to exchange points approved or managed by Roskomnazor, Russia's telecom watchdog.
A whole bunch of malware/ransomware will stop working... The real question will be how much stuff in the USA will stop because of this?
Yes, sir, Mr. Putin sir.. This will be a very interesting test.
Personally, I figure, even Russia doesn't have enough control over it's internet connectivity to actually isolate themselves fully.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I wonder how survivable an internet cut would really be in terms of domestic services..
How many things are mistakenly pointed at foreign DNS sources?
What assumptions do CDNs make about location and sources, DNS horizens etc that could prove faulty?
What complex filters and routing cost rules applied to BGP won't handle an event of that scale well?
What gremlins lurk in platforms like Azure and AWS that will behave badly if all routes to non-domestic hosts suddenly go away. That isnt a failure mode that gets a lot testing at a guess. Sometimes even a lot of redundancy does not roll as smoothly as we might imagine when failure modes we did not account for crop up. See Wells Fargo last week..
Honestly I applaud the Russians for undertaking the exercises. I'd *almost* say it would be a good thing for us to do here in the good old USA to do but I am not sure I want the government this administration or any other to have a working tested kill switch because I kinda be it would be misused ultimately.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Fun fact, that includes Duckduckgo. While there is some validity in a nation state testing it's infrastructure against attacks, this is not that. The testing will also confirm if Russia is able to monitor all traffic and the biggest risk believe it or not are darknet / porn servers hosted in Russia. Yes, that is a thing because it's one of the last places you'd ever expect to find them.
One other rather interesting test will be their BGP Interception since once international carriers pull their routes, it will cause a massive recalculation inside Russian (RUNET being primary). That will shunt traffic at their interception datacenters in much the same way the NSA works in the US. If Russia is spoofing Google for example all that traffic will suddenly hit theirs and not the real Google.
TL;dr This little test will uncover just how extensive their Government spies nationally and internationally. To announce it is quite odd.