Impenetrable Internet isolation – Newspaper Kommersant No. 174 (7375) of 09/21/2022

Talk about isolating Russia by disconnecting it from the global network was conducted long before the adoption of the law “on the sovereign Internet” in 2019. With the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, these fears, as expected by experts and participants in the telecommunications sector, should have become a reality: the country’s IT infrastructure was simply overwhelmed by a wave of cyber attacks. However, officials at various levels assured in unison that the scenario of shutting down the Runet is not being considered. Deputy Anton Gorelkin, in an interview with Parliamentary Newspaper in May, argued that “there is no single switch that can be pressed and turn off everything or a separate country.”

Now it turns out that there is a knife switch and hands were reaching for it. Aleksey Novikov, representative of the National Computer Incident Coordination Center (NCCC) at the FSB, openly stated this at the Kaspersky Industrial Cybersecurity Conference 2022, which began in Sochi on September 19: “I will say that there was a period in which the disconnection of the Runet from the rest of the network was seriously discussed Internet. That’s how serious the situation was.”

The vast majority of incidents over the past six months were DDoS attacks, which were a huge amount of traffic generated by Internet users, Mr. Novikov clarified, giving “their due”: “They managed to very quickly build an effective mechanism for involving users in this activity.”

Indirectly, the scenario was confirmed in the spring by the head of the Ministry of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev, noting that if Russia is disconnected from European exchange points, it will redirect Internet traffic through Asia. According to him, this plan B was considered by Rostelecom. Help came from where they were not expected: in May, US State Department spokesman Ned Price spoke out against Internet isolation, explaining that Russians should have “free access to information.”

But the de facto shutdown nevertheless began, though in a different way. At the end of the summer, Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov said in an interview with Kommersant that in six months about 138,000 Internet resources had been blocked in Russia, and the public sector was already preparing to move to the Russian domain zone (see Kommersant on September 14) .

In another six months, it may turn out that there is nothing to turn off: unfriendly foreign resources are blocked, VPN services for bypassing blocking too, .com has turned into .ru everywhere. Foreign social networks are no longer available to Russians, sources of information, including, for example, CNN, BBC, foreign films are disappearing from online cinemas, and music streaming is gradually losing tracks from The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Elvis Presley. Thus, users are already threatened not so much by technical isolation from the whole world as by social isolation.