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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.
All your internet are disconnected!
Well, I guess it was fun whilst it lasted, before the politicians wrecked it.
Think of all the spam bots and election tampering bots being down for a day or so. All those muh Russia types should be cheering.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
What else is BeauHD going to post stories about?
It's a full-fledged TRAGEDY!!!!
Being how the Russians with some other countries have militarized the internet, causing other countries to fight back, I could see this as an opportunity to update all the equipment as to stop foreign attacks on them, as well disconnect any attacks in progress.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My Wordpress sites will breathe a sigh of relief and might actually serve up genuine content to some real visitors for a change.
(Russia disconnects from Internet for short test)
(Rest of world notices 50% drop in spam, bots, DDoS attacks)
(Russia goes to reconnect internet. Rest of world: "You know, maybe you should continue the test another 6 months or maybe indefinitely...?")
-Styopa
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 have to wonder about the scale of what it would take to isolate a country. How many data pipelines would likely run into a country the size of Russia? For instance, would cutting ~20 have an impact on 80% of traffic? Or are we talking 000s, or more? I assume there's a long tail here, but that a very large percentage of all traffic is probably routed through a small number of sources...?
--Dave
Only and handful of major pipes into R afaik
This seems like a setup for some sort of russian heist movie. Like someone has to get in to steal some macguffin piece of tech while there is no internet to detect them or something like that.
odinnadtsat' druzey Oushena: coming to a theater near you.
Note: Apparently you cant use Cyrillic script in comments, it just shows up as blank.
just to keep our nerd passes
Surely they just default their own internal one
According to my understanding of https://global-internet-map-2018.telegeography.com/ i see only 13 backbone lines. But like i said, i might not understand it completely or the map might not be complete.
The first strike will not be nukes. There are dozens of actors that could take out the internet. A society should be resilient enough that it can susrvive without the web. This is basic civil defense. It should not be a partisan issue.
I like pickles. We should create a society where i can go to the store and buy some pickles even if another nation r group takes down the backbone of the hyperconnecter internet new wave society
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
In Soviet Russia, Internet disconnects y{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
#DeleteFacebook
Russia and China are working together. It makes sense to have similar first strike capabilities. And yes, this is a first strike type capability. Protecting your communications.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is a near certainty that Russia has at least 100% more that connected quietly to the internet (probably follows large gas pipelines), that are for military use only.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
- Russia disconnects from Internet for short test.
- Rest of world gets hit with "mysterious" virus/worm that takes down critical financial/industrial/military infrastructure.
- Russia decides not to reconnect to protect their systems.
- Brave Russian programmers develop "cure" for virus/worm, offer to help rest of world for "small" price (just eastern Europe).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Well, unless they cut all phone and other telecom connections as well as jam around the border....
Well, then there are all the satellite based "backup" circuits and services you'd need to disrupt too. Good luck...
I think the Russians would be ill advised to try blocking all these paths, but it sure would be interesting to observe them trying. The amount of stuff we could learn about their capabilities would be invaluable. Please Mr. Putin, Please do this. Show us what ya got.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Not many people in the US use it, but Yandex is a very popular cloud service in Europe and other places, with businesses relying on it for day to day usage as much as businesses here in the US rely on AWS. I wonder how an outage will affect the customers using that for their day to day business.
As I mentioned below, there is near zero chance of Russia being 100% isolated. There will certainly be other lines that will connect from hidden points in the west, and then ran back to Russian SVR.
The interesting issue will be if some of the malware continues to work. That would say that the server is either outside of Russia, OR the aforementioned hidden points are running, and considered secured.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...plus all the undersea cables that they've tapped into.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Thy could go for 2 birds with one stone and also test their anti Satellite missiles at the same time on these ummm "Backup Circuits?"
**Life is too short to be serious**
I think the various Internet killswitches are being made primarily in case of a Black Mirror S01E01 scenario...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Awesome. Finally someone using the correct intelligence agency name instead of the usual FSB.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I'm sure they know how easy it would be to circumvent this measure from external threats getting in. All it takes is a bunch of satellite based routes and compromised consumer equipment to get in and be difficult to detect.
Doesn't everybody really understand why the US government is so concerned about Huawei? Governments understand that all the routers running BGP control what gets blocked and what get routed. Whose routers do people think are being used everywhere?
This "experiment" is meant to block Russian citizens from accessing the world of free speech to protect their oligarchy in the event of an emergency.
Greed is the root of all evil.
LOL.. It's thinking like that which will get a war started.
I can tell you that shooting at satellites you don't own is likely to be interpreted as a prelude to war, if not a declaration of war. As such, I'd bet the Russians would be unlikely to do that.
However, what they *might* do is some jamming to disrupt communications without doing any lasting damage. "Oh, so your Yankee satellite was broken for awhile? Too bad. You should have used ours, they don't break like yours.. "
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Jokes aside the Russian mafia elites along with their God Father Tsar Putin do everything to brainwash the poor Russian people into believing the country is the best in the world despite very low wages, underdeveloped industries, technological gap, huge brain drain, horrible health care (which is roughly 20-30 years behind the rest of the world), rampant corruption, poor ecological situation in many cities, comparatively low average life span, totally malfunctioning courts and police that mainly serve the richest.
The Internet is the only media that cannot fully control, so this could be a nice test of what else they can deprive the people of, so that the opposition has literally no means of revealing the truth about the inner workings of Russia.
You see, in many countries of the worlds there's mafia however as for Russia mafia has its own ... state.
Estonia is a first and foremost a poor country to outsource IT businesses into.
It also is a large Putins money laundromat.
Will not be cut jam. Jam is need for tea.
Pulling the plug on all known connections is a way to find unknown connections. If after pulling the plug, any packets find their way in or out, they will know that they haven't found all the connections. To do this you could stage software inside and outside of Russia that attempted pings in each direction. You would track any pings actually received and track down the path they took. This could be coordinated with non-Internet based data connections.
Possibly valid for countries that have only a few connections to the outside world. Definitely not valid for Russia. The doomsday scenario that the politicians tout, "enemies will disconnect Russia", is not viable, because it would involve an unprecedented degree of collaboration from too many "enemies" (Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, to name a few). Proof: let's look with whom e.g. Rostelecom has connections. https://bgp.he.net/AS12389#_peers lists companies from too many countries that are not allies to each other. The same is true for other big Russian ISPs. In other words, because nobody outside can disconnect Russia, this is only a test to verify that Vladimir Putin can do it at will.
Personally, I figure, even Russia doesn't have enough control over it's internet connectivity to actually isolate themselves fully.
This is the quote I was looking for.
I have had to do communications isolation before. It is easy to prevent all useful traffic from flowing. It is easy to block the majority of communications...
but you can't block all communications.
Somewhere within Russia, there is someone using a satellite to get out of the country and back onto the planet somewhere other than Russia.
Somewhere within Russia, there is someone using radio waves with an end point across the border.
Somewhere within Russia, there is someone creating links to the internet through non-traditional means that the default block will miss.
Each one of those "leaks" is minor in the scheme of things, but once information finds those paths, the pressure will be intense. Lots of information will flow.
And Russia is about to find this out. I call it a leak test. They may not be intending this to be a leak test, but it is a good leak test. :)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
"To do this you could stage software inside and outside of Russia that attempted pings in each direction. You would track any pings actually received and track down the path they took. This could be coordinated with non-Internet based data connections."
Why would they go to that much effort for such poor info if they could just subscribe to BGPMon (bgpmon.net) for a month ($13)?
Actually, that's a brilliant strategy. They're waiting for Trump to show off how he can disconnect the US from the Internet much longer and much better!
Mind the frickin' laser...
"To do this you could stage software inside and outside of Russia that attempted pings in each direction. You would track any pings actually received and track down the path they took. This could be coordinated with non-Internet based data connections."
Why would they go to that much effort for such poor info if they could just subscribe to BGPMon (bgpmon.net) for a month ($13)?
To look for unexpected paths? BGP certainly drives the bulk of routing configuration but is it guaranteed that *all* routes are manged via BGP? Granted that a small number observation points are unlikely to find rogue routes, but there may be other tests that could be done to find them. Sometimes it is worth testing the "impossible".
Who's "we"? Maybe we don't need you either.
The USA, the most sense infamous of villian's in today's world, has got no room to blame Russia for the same shit. Russians just less Sneaky, which if anything is more honorable
Well, according to the fact checking site Snoops, Trump did say this in 2015:
"We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way Somebody will say, ‘Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people."
See: https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...
Actually shutting down the internet is relatively common worldwide. India, Pakistan and Iraq shuts down the internet fairly often. It often happens during political unrest.
/s/Snoops/Snops
according to the fact checking site Snoops
Fact check: Snopes is not a fact checking site.
As soon as politicians started thinking about the Internet, I knew it would be ruined and gone. Such a shame. It was so good while it lasted. Such sense of freedom. No borders and shit. I guess we'll have to invent something else to keep the humanity connected without borders and stupid politicians.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Depends on the peering deals the Soviet Union and Russia got over the decades to the West.
What went into East Germany, Poland.
What was done for Russian in past years.
The Soviet planning of a domestic network and a fully monitored international network.
Russia had to use the same network and now has two different networks.
The trick might be in how the long-distance connection still got separated from all other networks.
Its stops and everything else keeps working internally as everything international from Russia is now all digital.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
On the plus side though, World of Warcraft will be a friendly place again without the huge black market for gold farming and account hijacking.
In Russia, there are distributed nodes of root servers F and K, operated respectively by US non-profit ISC and EU-based RIPE NCC. I assume that they would try to run without them, given they are not operated by a russian company.
Without hearing "Cyka Blyat".
/me goes to rush b
shhhh. Few here have ever worked in intelligence (and it shows). This way, you can avoid dealing with total idiots.
As it is, there are many here that think that Putin is a communist, and that China is not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...