Let’s say Russia starts doing some particularly nasty cyber warfare. Not just propaganda, but things like causing major blackouts, banks to lose their data, etc. Would it be possible for the US or western nations as a whole to somehow kick their entire country off the internet?
By “kick them off the Internet” do you mean block all access to websites originating in Russia?
In part. I mean to disable all messages coming out of Russia on the internet, as well as blocking anyone to be able to send any information in.
Well, that would kind of cut off the actual Russian people from the information that they need to understand what is going on, I don’t think that is a good idea. Russia is not a monolithic something that can be addressed as one entity.
There seems to be an active government section involved in cyberwarfare, other parts that are more scam involved Wild, Wild West stuff, and normal people who are already restricted in the information they get.
About the best that can be done is what is being tried, restricting the global money transfers and holdings, I think that will quickly become a laughable train wreck and there will be easy work-arounds. But we will see.
I’ve wondered about that, and I’d think it’s too distributed to effectively shut them off completely. I mean, you could mandate that US ISPs not carry traffic originating from Russian hosts, but that wouldn’t have effect for anywhere outside of the US. And they can always spoof where they’re coming from anyway.
Keep in mind that the “internet”, or at least the protocols underpinning it (TCP/IP, DNS, and so on) were originally designed to be redundant and resilient, because in large part, communication links at the time were unreliable, and any sort of network like ARPANET (the technical foundation of today’s internet, and more or less a proto-Internet) had to work that way. There’s some question whether a design goal of ARPANET was survivability during nuclear war as well.
That very redundancy and resilience would make it really hard to just cut a country off unilaterally.
For what it’s worth, I was thinking in terms of physically disconnecting them, just like the volcanic eruption did with Tonga recently.
Tonga’s a bit of a special case, in that it’s an island nation with essentially a single seafloor telecom cable.
Russia could have dozens of connections at every country they border with, plus stuff like satellites.
They would operate out of every other country, including the U.S., so I would say that the answer is a definite “no”.
But it would be fun to try!
As above. Zero chance. If any country is going to engage in cyber-warfare you can be sure they have already set up systems across the planet ready to connect and start causing problems.
A lot of attacks depend upon large scale distributed capabilities in the first place. Our of friend DDOS has it in the name - distributed denial of service. It is just a matter of a very thin control channel back to home and that can be very hard to track down. Things like TOR make that even harder.
One might hope that in the years since these threats came to attention that the various services charged with protecting us against attack have worked out some useful mitigation measures. Shutting down some interconnects is probably on the list, but there is an element of doors and bolting horses here. Shutting down local interconnects may be more of a priority to contain attacks that are already rampant.
Worse, a lot of attacks are going to involve previously compromised systems. All the human attack vectors out there can be used to install various malware, that rather than being the usual ransomware, is malware designed to cause major damage. That just needs the command to start creating mayhem. After that it is no longer the attacker’s problem.
Finally, actively shutting down the backbone connections to any country in a time of conflict is getting close to an act that can be used to justify even more aggressive actions. Nothing is easy.
I would think something more useful would be radio interference to mess up their equivalent of GPS (or even monkey with USA GPS when the satellites are over Russia). Mess up any targeting. mess up radio communications. Perhaps we’ll see the opening salvos of cyberwar being more physical, like taking out each other’s communications satellites. In a show a week ortwo ago, Rachel Maddow mentioned odd Russian naval maneuvers in the North Sea and those ones in the Irish area of the Atlantic, which seemed to be located where some undersea critical fiber cables are located. Cutting out a lot of capacity between America and Europe could have financial consequences.
Whereas, there will certainly be plenty of land communications between Russia and its neighbours, so harder to do stealth attacks. Ukraine is all land border. I envision something more like USA making gaps in Nord Stream to ensure the Russians make no money from it.
Here you can see the west is very vulnerable to ocean cable interruptions, Russia much less so.
I guess the question is - how crazy can things get?
I don’t know if it merits another thread, but the cyberwarfare aspects of this Ukranian invasion are the most interesting to me. From blocking banks from access to global markets with the mere changing of a user account setting somewhere, to using social media as a real-time survelliance on troop movements (as well as the very effective dis-moralization (is that a word?) campaign being waged against Russian troops) to Russian banks being blocked from the web because of DOD attacks, to, hell, just 10 minutes ago Anonymous released the entire phone directory for the Southern District of Russia’s Military apparatus:
Just amazing stuff and the behinds-the-scenes cyber work at the CIA, NSA, EU, Federal Reserve, etc must be absolutely intense. I’ll probably be dead before all the stories come out, but there must be a kazillion of them already.
Imagine two very different war vets swapping stories…
“I hadn’t eaten anything but lichen for two days by the time we came upon our objective, the German artillery at the top of the mountain…”
“Man, tell me about it. I was on my 5th Red Bull in 7 hours before the password incursion into this shitty Russian bank worked.”
I mean, shit like this didn’t happen in WW2. But it’s happening hourly in Ukraine, all these little attacks on internal Russian morale and Putin support, all aided by moms with cell phones and hot drinks.
Large swaths of the internet go “down” whenever there’s a DNS outage or other seemingly innocuous configuration issue on some random server. There’s definitely some specific points of failure in the system that makes it less resilient than you’d think. So it seems like it should at least be possible to direct such vulnerabilities at a particular country. Even if it’s not 100% effective, it would still be highly disruptive.
One way to reduce Russian access to the Internet is to “cut the cable” - reduce the physical connections that provide internet access.
Cogent, one of the internet “backbone” service providers, is doing that: it’s announced that it will no longer provide service to Russia:
It’s triggered a debate about whether that is a good thing. Cogent argues that it doesn’t want the Russian government to use its serves for cyberattacks and propaganda. However, internet free speech advocates argue that Cogent is making it harder for Russian citizens to get accurate news from outside sources.
Cogent’s move doesn’t cut Russia off from the internet, but will likely make connectivity slower.
And a WaPo article about the consequences of restricting internet access, which likely plays into the hands of authoritarian governments:
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