Podcast
Root Causes 07: Russian Disconnection from the Internet


Hosted by
Tim Callan
Chief Compliance Officer
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Original broadcast date
February 19, 2019
Russia has stated that it will disconnect from the internet as a trial exercise for full-blown cyber warfare. This idea presents many problems for Russian services, systems, and businesses, especially since they depend on global systems such as DNS and public Certificate Authorities. Join us to learn some of the problems Russia will face if indeed it disconnects.
Podcast Transcript
Lightly edited for flow and brevity.
That might be the simplest use case. Could be quite difficult there.
But what’s interesting is if the reports are correct, they’re going to go ahead and live with it with a little bit now. Right? It would be like saying, “Look we’re prepared for the nuclear option and yeah, we’ll go ahead and nuke a few of our citizens today just to see what it’s like.”
You know if you were to try to pull that off in a western country, you know it might result in a little bit of flak, let’s say.
This is assuming you’re not on a .ru. Let’s say you’re on .com/.net or one of the common TLD’s. So then after they reunite, it’s going to the main TLD, right? It’s going to go back to what Verisign says, at which point the domain squatter now owns it and people in Russia start resolving to the domain squatter. That’s it. You didn’t renew your domain. You don’t get to go get it back.
In other words, if you and I, Tim, were to call up our local ISP and say, “Hey I’d like to hire your internet services. Would you mind giving me a different IP address 100 times per second?”
It’s incredible how connected a lot of people’s lives are. Don’t forget there’s also a lot of very legitimate commercial activity in Russia that will be affected.
But at the same time I know that Russia has an awful lot of very smart computer scientists. A lot of them are much smarter than I am, and surely somebody asked these questions. So, unless it’s just posturing, it feels like they think that this is viable.

