Russia 'successfully tests' its unplugged internet
bbc.com
bbc.com
So we don’t know what exactly they tested. Why is this news, let alone an international one?
Also, as far as I understand, what the Russians were officially saying was that they were developing fallback systems for the event if, in another bout of sanctions, Russia gets disconnected from the global internet. Which, given their standing with the international community, may be a reasonable thing to do. But the journalists present this story as Russia's voluntary step towards isolating itself from the global internet. I am not sure why.
I believe Putin wants to undo glasnost.
Honest, quality journalism is a fantasy. It never existed. Even Benjamin Franklin used his newspaper to influence elections by slandering his political rivals. Not to mention fake news[0].
[0]: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/02/even-ben-frankli...
Both exist.
Some potential benefits to Russia:
1. Thwart cyber attacks
2. Control information
3. Halt foreign online payments
There are of course downsides, but I think the original premise was security in the event of war / aggression.
That was my understanding as well.
I think the main concern of the Russian internet users is to get isolated from the rest of the internet indefinitely during peace time, in a way of China or North Korea. I am not sure we are seeing signs that the Russian government intends to go that far yet.
The Internet is a vital infrastructure element. Leaving the risk of potential disruption to some US congressmen's whims is not a very wise choice. Of course it can be used with bad intentions as well but so can anything else. I think I've already mentioned this in my older post and it was downvoted eagerly.
This is a claim made by the Russian government with little actual support as far as I know. It comes up every once in a while when the issue is mentioned, and is usually uncritically accepted.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/01/27/russia-to-...
I don't know that statement's veracity, but it seems credible.
It looks like you are the one looking for excuse. Following your logic Russia should really wait until threats become very serious then be hit in the face and only then react? I think you're asking a for bit too much Kumbaya.
Here:From the "JOINT MOTION FOR A RESOLUTION" from the European Parlament ( https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-8-2014-0118... )
" 12. Recalls that the restrictive measures taken by the EU are directly linked to the Russian Federation’s violation of international law with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Ukraine, while the trade measures taken by the Russian Federation, including those against Ukraine and other Eastern Partnership countries which have recently concluded Association Agreements with the EU, are unjustified; calls for the EU to consider excluding Russia from civil nuclear cooperation and the Swift system; "
Now as far as it concerns the Internet there is even no real need to bring Swift example. Any country would be insane to let their Internet infrastructure under someone else's control. Question of course how much it will cost to build a replacement for situations if the things go sour. So for many countries, especially the ones that are on friendly terms with the US, they can let it slide. Not so much for Russia, China etc.
The news is that they can now isolate their Internet domestically and run a Russia-only WWW. They presumably could have shut it off completely from Day 1.
The utility of the web isn't the protocols it technology employed; it's the content.
I can imagine online banking with foreign entities would become a problem as well.
There are also media of a more liberal nature who can’t comfortably host in RuNet / being registered as Russian companies, so they exist outside. meduza.io being a prominent example
By whom? State actors can just launch attacks from computers that have both a Russian internet link and a link up to a internet providing satellite, no?
The way you actually reduce attack surface is to take the critical pieces off of it and minimize the paths to be watched, not the whole system. That would be like ensuring it is possible to close off all of the highways into Washington DC to response time for the three federal branches. If it was actually that damn important they would make and use secure tunnels. The only added benefit is an excuse to shut out protesters.
Not to mention mere independence isn't everything for system functionalities. Going to muscle powered factories to remove logistical dependence on power would be an obviously stupid move for example because the performance is so much worse. It is "selling ceramic knives that cannot be sharpened as never needing it" marketing deception of trying to cast a flaw as a strength.
Russia doesn't need pretense for control.
This is actually most useful for security. At least if you are attacked your national network will survive.
That is extremely unlikely to happen. Payments, banking, investment will be always connected, or placed abroad in the required way. At least for important enough transactions - probably not Amazon, but stock trades...
> That is extremely unlikely to happen.
That's what very much has already happened. Visa and MasterCard pulled their services a few years ago after another set of US sanctions. Also, if you are a business and using SWIFT to transact - US has the final say what you can and can not do. So now Russia has it's own payment card system MiR and working with China, India and even Iran on alternative to SWIFT.
I think it was a mistake for US to retract payment services. A smaller country may be severely affected by it indeed, but not a country of the size of Russia, China or India.
Now if payment networks were pulled, then what is next? Internet would be the logical follow-up. Hence the testing. It all makes perfect sense when you look at it from Rissia's side.
When did that happen? I’ve been paying with a Master Card just recently in Russia.
I find it interesting. I wouldn’t have known otherwise.
Because control over access to the web is a theme of lawmaking and enforcement here for almost ten years. This is not an isolated initiative. I'd also very much like to know what exactly the ‘test’ consisted of, but there's no doubt that Russian government dreams of having a Big Russian Firewall and the rest of the wonderful Chinese inventions.
Like e.g. having some government-mandated apps preinstalled on every phone sold here, which is coming into force in some following months. Like having messenger users identified by linking them to phone numbers, which is already a law and soon will be a law for email too (if I didn't miss it having been passed).
It is the news the exact meaning of which is open to interpretation. Given that those pre-installed apps can be uninstalled, we should at least allow a possibility that rather than being an insidious tactic to spy on users this is simply a clumsy protectionist anti-competitive legislation to stimulate growth of local tech companies.
Secondly, pretending that this is an independent event and that the government, Duma, courts and police have a shred of good will after what they were doing for the last ten–twenty years, is so laughable that your insistence on that interpretation is baffling and suggestive.
Even if by some miracle the apps are innocent at first, nothing prevents the FSB from slipping in different functionality after a year, or even in an update.
If by the "good will" you mean whether they are earnestly concerned with improving the quality of life of ordinary Russian citizens, then the answer is, most likely not.
But between this and the worst possible interpretation (oh, they must be doing this to allow the FSB easy access into everyone's phones) there are various other possible interpretations, involving various degrees of self-indulgence or maliciousness. Can it be cheap publicity or a symbolic gesture? The first sponsor of the legislation is a member of LDPR, a nationalist party which is obsessed with Russian identity and isolationism. Can it be part of the import substitution project that Russia has been pursuing (largely unsuccessfully, I understand?) since 2014, to loosen its dependency on foreign imports? Can it be a protectionist measure to help otherwise uncompetitive local businesses? I think any of these options is realistic enough to explain the existence of the bill, even without going all the way to regarding it as a covert Kremlin/FSB operation. Which of course it may be, but it is simply too early to tell. I am sure in half a year — or whenever distributors start pre-installing prescribed apps — security experts will let us know whether these apps, besides just being a nuisance, are actually doing something malicious. Then we will have actual facts at our disposal, not just worries and speculations.
Do you remember the much-maligned Yarovaya law from several years back? Has it had any scary practical consequences on the Russian internet?
Which is an issue that affects pretty much every smartphone with a default Android ROM: Google is baked deep in there, often there's a ton of additional smartphone vendor bloat and trackingware.
A lot, if not all of that data can be accessed by US intelligence agencies trough the third-party doctrine [0].
The same applies to the biggest social media companies out there, they are all US based: Billions of people, all over the world, tell Facebook their deepest secrets and most personal and private details.
For any non-American that's a massive OpSec risk just waiting to happen, its making large parts of populations suddenly very transparent and vulnerable to all kinds of nasty tactics like blackmail [1].
Which is one of the main reasons why countries like Russia and China push domestic alternatives: It's not all just about controlling the platform, the biggest part of it is giving their citizens a local alternative that doesn't mass-scale dox them to an "adversary state".
In that context, I consider it kinda weird how US Americans freak out over TikTok being Chinese and some app by Russian developers sending data to Amazon servers, supposedly being "massive security risks".
But when other countries don't want to give up their populations data wholesale to the US, that's suddenly made out as pure oppressive authoritarianism.
As a Russian citizen it is not uncommon to go to jail for two years for expressing anti government views online, that kind of thing does not happen int he west - for now.
While at home we jail people for viewing "terrorist content online" [2], which is so vaguely defined that it regularly ends up being "The other sides PoV", if that PoV even manages to penetrate to the everpresent layer of moderation on social media [3].
After terrorism, the next thing is now "hate speech" [4], and as much as US Americans think they are immune to such trends, they really are not. US millennials increasingly welcome and actually demand more moderation because they think that's gonna solve their right-wing extremist problem.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/saddest...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41479620
[3] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-th...
[4] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-dozens-of-raids-over-online-ha...
Uh, I get that you want to highlight the hypocrisy of the west, but that was an astoundingly poor argument: By killing Pakistani the west silences criticism at home? And then as proof this happens you link to examples of domestic criticism?
Why are you adding this restriction? Rooting or replacing the system are totally valid of getting rid of these things.
I am not really trying to protect Russia here but articles like the one in the title are written for brain dead people. They should go try janitor work instead.
Because Russia is the bad guy du jour... They have to gal to try to not sell their country and assets wholesale to foreign interests, plus something kleptocracy something (which the West never minds when it comes to allies, or their own behaviour in Asia, L. America, Africa, etc).
So you get the usual barrage or news items, and people who can't even point Europe on the map (much less such subtlety as to point to e.g. France or Russia) feel like they can have an opinion.
The strategic implications are quite vast on a variety of levels: political, military, technical, economic.
The 'nationalisation' of the web into various national webs is a big deal.
Aren't there private and public keys involved ? Public keys are pre-packaged with clients (Firefox/Chrome/etc), so the state can't just change or fake the private keys.
Maybe they would force all clients to prepackage a government key and then change all infrastructure to pretend all websites use this public key for their https traffic?
Because sanctioning a country off the internet has never been done. It's not a credible threat given the topology. Russia is land adjacent to many countries that would be unlikely to participate in a partitioning led by the US, and such a partition would not be very effective if only some countries participated.
Neither North Korea nor Iran are or have been disconnected from the global internet or phone systems by outside countries, and they are the most sanctioned nations.
Not to mention Japan, to which they are directly connected via two distinct 640 Gbps links, Hokkaido-Sakhalin and Nadhodka-Naoetsu: https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-afr... and https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-afr...
As I read the articles, the "disconnection from the internet" seems to be one more tool in the toolbox for internal control. A disconnection will also prevent possible "outside influences" from amplifying problems during any sensitive periods (e.g. the time following Putin's eventual death).
President Vladimir Putin may hunt shirtless, fly with cranes, cuddle with tigers, etc. but he is not (yet?) immortal.
Once Putin dies, the people running the show need a successor for the supreme leader of the Russian Federation to step in fast and assert legitimacy, with force, if necessary.
Any dissent against the successor needs to be squashed quickly, otherwise any displeasure in the form of rioting runs the risk of spreading and giving the currently oppressed opposition chances to grow their influence.
Also, opportunistic power grab attempts by lesser players and regions need to be contained.
Edit: to be clear, I assume Putin will somehow keep his power even after he is officially not the President (after the 2024 elections).
One way to deal with this is context. In this case the pattern of Russia with regard to electronic free speech is pretty clear, so it's reasonable to assume these actions are at least partially motivated by something other than emergency preparedness.
Thesis: a lot of conservative America have a bit of a thing for the iron wall.
Pitching it thus, as if Russia were to build its own "Great Wall of China", or perhaps putting them in the "North Korea Internet, LOL!" category, probably catches eyeballs.
Although it has to be said that there are other supposedly more free western nations that have done similar dodgy things with their Internet, and didn't quite get the hard treatment in media-at-scale, but rather more of a velvet glove... Yes, 5-eyes nation citizens, you might ought want to take a closer look at the Anglo plans for the Internet, they're not quite savoury ..
It never fails to amaze me how little attention is paid to these systems that can track, intercept and hijack the comms of mobile phone users of any country, internationally.
It is a long running rumor in Russian internet that Russian spies managed to tap UK politician phones with fake roaming requests in 2016.
I wonder if this trend of closed borders limited information circulation could lead to the diminishing of companies that depend on the network effect and rise of the companies with hard tech.
There is no reason to think that "hard tech" (assuming you mean more physical hardware) would benefit as a field they aren't really competitors even in terms of sucking up talent. Isolation wouldn't give them an edge there.
Second as fragments would call for reinventing the wheel locally or possibly copying it to serve an insular market. We have already seen this with Cuban mechanics. They didn't become "the Detroit of the third world" producing cheaper cars for other nations, or even a divergent tech path for transit that was better in some way. They just essentially practiced at the art of antique automobile necromancy. Small players with adjacent bigger markets can innovate and scale up. Small players in small markets stagnate. The "small and local serves you better" is more meme than fact. People really want their parochial corner to be just as good but it hasn't worked out that way and stays small for several good reasons, and "choice" isn't one of them.
Same for China.
It has always been that way.
The US does the same. Indeed, the US takes down stuff globally, often by pwning a site's primary DNS servers.
But of course, they claim that they are only taking down "illegal" sites. But there's rarely (if ever) any sort of due process.
Edit: This is a well known fact. The FBI even brags about it, from time to time. But if any y'all want to claim that it's not, or is somehow distinguishable, please do share.
Edit: For example, the FBI took down a news site, which was arguably protected by the Constitution:
... and you can see it through early 2019 here:
You missing out on some content is collateral damage, and that's not the government's problem. After all, there's government-approved content, and that should be enough.
They can afford to have 15% of the population with access to information and what not on the black market. The course of the country will be dictated by the beliefs of the other 85%, which will all buy into the 1000s of kaleidoscopic realities readily manufactured by Surkov & Co, and will all support every single action of the government.
This world needs an alternative to anything built by the USA. That way superpowers will have to go to the negotiation table on an equal footing. We don't want one bully. We need at least 5 bullies.
World Bank has never been important to Russia. You're right the US is dominating financial world right now which most of the world hates and its inevitable for something else to compete.
If the countries could sustain themselves without credit from them then they have no need to be involved. The worst is essentially snarky comments pointing out that the current management goes against orthodoxy/still hasn't paid them back from 1977. If the country succeeds despite going against their judgement then they just look silly until either the world bank revises their conventional wisdom or they get to say "told ya so!" when the shoe drops.
Austerity may do worse than an open credit pipeline in terms of growth and human impact but there are no guarantees that the creditor wouldn't mess that up as well and solvency is required to function in their role. While nice they literally can't be an infinite credit that never needs paid back fountain.
Nations are all bullies. To their people and externally. Without them, though, other bullies take their place. Usually, they're worse.
Be careful what you wish for - there were 5 bullies 105 years ago and we know what happened!
Wealthy warrior elites are left with terrible dilemmas with merchants. If they let merchants grow then their position slips (less elite) but the military position stays the same or grows from taxes. If they don't then their holdings become backwards and they weaken, but they retain their hold on power internally. They can try to plunder but that means war and even if successful running out of prey to hunt. Seizing territory spreads them thinner and gives more administrative burden.
Peace is really a terrible weapon of attrition against warrior elites. It forces them to stab themselves with Morton's fork repeatably.
The funny thing is that economic bullies find themselves in the same role, as they either become warrior elite literally (using force for gain) or metaphorically (using their economic clout as a cudgel) vs new challengers who themselves may render them irrelevant if they fail to innovate.
Normally I'd expect Globocorp to configure its intranet with, for example, a separate AS each for Germany and Russia. But the AS in Germany may be connected to the Russia AS via a 155 Mb/s leased line from Berlin to St Petersburg with BGP routers. The German AS may also connect via a corporate firewall to a public ISP in Germany, and the Russian AS to a public ISP in Russia.
It is theoretically possible, therefore for a user on a public ISP to connect via Globocorp's intranet to a public ISP web site in Germany.
Is there some technical or administrative requirement to prevent transit via corporate intranets?
Unless they are intending to provide transit, the only routes they would announce to peers in either country would be to their own network.
I'm sure there's a lot of stuff you'd need to roll, I bet it would make for an interesting article :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
I can imagine that US will also disconnect itself if hostile access to critical infrastructure is at stake.
China is permanently semi-connected for that matter.
Google Translate with some manual editing for clarity by me.
# 1: https://t.me/zatelecom/13046
"I got and decoded some materials from today's meeting of the Ministry of Digital Affairs on the exercises. Something tells me either a closed regime or not closed regime will be announced, but we won’t be able to get access either way. So, feed on some rumors. Let it be rumors from me. After [sunglasses] are my additions, probably mocking, will always follow. Based on what I heard and the slides, I can draw two additional conclusions:
the Internet is impossible to understand and nobody understands what needs testing;
️ THEY'RE CONFUSING the law “on sustainable Runet” and the law “on critical objects of information infrastructure”. These are different laws, each living in its own sandbox, this confusion has been going on since the very beginning of the draft law “on a stable Runet”
️️️ Some slides (for some reason labeled Positive Technologies):
⏰ On December 16 and 17, exercise scenarios were worked out to ensure the stability and integrity of mobile radiotelephone communications for the SS7 and Diameter protocols
All four federal mobile operators participated in the exercises. As part of the exercises, 18 attack scenarios were worked out for each operator - 12 through signal networks 2/3 of the SS7 generation and 6 through signal networks Diameter
️ The attacker was able to successfully carry out 62.5% of attacks through SS7 and 50% through DIameter The average attack detection time was about 2-3 minutes
During the exercise, all scenarios were completed in full. Testing out the scenarios for each operator was about 6 hours. On average, working out one scenario took about 20 minutes. [sunglasses] Grains of corn fried by each curator were eaten about 800 grams each. Drunk 24 liters of coffee. 46.5 kg of cookies consumed
LEARNING RECOMMENDATIONS
To increase the effectiveness of warning, detecting and blocking attacks through signaling networks on the side of the telecom operator, it is necessary to provide:
1️⃣ Attack detection tools through the SS7 and Diameter signaling networks, which will allow timely detection of attacks on individual mobile subscribers and the operator’s infrastructure
2️⃣ Telecommunication equipment settings that prohibit signaling messages that are not used to establish communications between operators, but can be used to conduct attacks on networks of telecom operators
3️⃣ Procedures and security tools that allow you to quickly block ataui through signal networks
4️⃣ Periodic external signaling network security audits
5️⃣ Leave the market if points 1-4 were as unexpected for the operator as for representatives of the Ministry of Digital
CONCLUSIONS ON THE RESULTS OF THE EXERCISES
In the Russian Federation, it is necessary to create a regulatory framework and a unified system for collecting and analytically processing information about attacks through signaling networks on the infrastructure and subscribers of mobile telecom operators, as well as connecting it to the State SOPKA [2/3 slide picture from 4 positions OPERATORS -> UNIFIED SYSTEM -> GASOPOK]
[sunglasses] Also in the Russian Federation, it is necessary to create a regulatory framework, to create a unified system for collecting and analytically processing information about attacks on WordPress and PHPNuke, as well as connecting it to GosSOPKA
[sunglasses] Also in the Russian Federation, it is necessary to create a regulatory framework to create a unified system for collecting and analytical processing of information about attacks on active switches, as well as connecting it to the State SOPKA
[sunglasses] Also in the Russian Federation, it is necessary to create a regulatory framework, to create a unified system for collecting and analytical processing of information about viruses sent to e-mail boxes, as well as connecting it to GosSOPKA"
# 2: https://t.me/zatelecom/13053
"About yesterday's "exercises." Again. Well, because in the morning the calls started again and the cart was breaking. Let me write here once, so I don't have to get up six times.
1. These were no "exercises." The circus that Sokolov arranged in the Ministry of Socks [Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation ~Editor] is at most an "interagency meeting." Any military man will tell you that "Exercises are combat training activities, where the troops solve tasks on the ground in conditions that are closest to combat, large-scale comprehensive training operations."
And in the ministry they held a MEETING. That's all.
2. Hysterical squirrels rush about the Internet with stories that "everything broke !!! aaaa !!!". Say hello to them. In fact, of course, the two dozen morons sitting in the office could not break anything. First of all, who would let them, the morons, onto real networks?
3. The proof that all those who gathered for the “exercises” are first-class morons was that when they were talking nonsense about the “18 attack scenarios”, nobody laughed. Everyone sat with serious faces and nodded their heads.
I'll explain: "attacks through the SS-7 protocol" is about telephony. Not about the Internet. SS-7 (aka OKS-7) is, roughly speaking, the protocol by which signaling data for dialing is transmitted. The fact that we have not heard for a hundred thousand years that someone “broke the phone number” tells us that the telephone operators are working and the holes (yes, there were holes) were closed. Well, the figure of 62.5% of successful attacks, firstly, tells us that in two-thirds of the calls we could not get through, and secondly - how, tell me, from 12 attacks the figure could be 62.5%? ? Is this a successful attack in 7.5 cases out of 12?
Further, Diameter protocol is likewise not related to the Internet. Google what Diameter is already. Hint: This is a service authorization-authentication-accounting protocol that is used in IMS networks. This applies to mobile communications and IP telephony. To IP-telephony, in short. But not to the internet. Well, half of the successful attacks tell us that these numbers were obtained "at a training ground", which was set up by bungling dumbasses, or simply thought up.
4. I want to remind you that there is no "sovereign runet". It was not built. And the forecast for the "construction" of this crap is 5 years, minimum. Look: for the first year they will only work on a sub-law and write a technical assignment. Then for two more years they will work out the engineering solution. Which will become obsolete exactly at the beginning of implementation. And then they will implement it for another three years - Rostelecom only has seven macro-regions and 79 branches. Just to bring equipment to everyone is already an impossible task for assholes from the offices. And it, equipment, also needs to be installed, commissioning, acceptance, testing, signing of acts ... Well, trust me - RTK can delay projects for decades ... I can say exactly the same thing about other "very large operators" . And it didn’t get into a fucking little thing - imagine a box designed by the morons from the offices.
Therefore, I repeat, any failures on the networks can be justified by anything, but not by “sovereign runet”.
Enough hysteria!"
Uber - Yandex(russian alternative) etc.
Thought experiment: Can you imagine Russian satcom provider providing Internet service to US based customers in violation of the US law?
Rarely is technology a sole answer to social or political problem.