Russian government takes control of Ukraine’s Internet infrastructure Ukraine and redirects traffic to Russian operators in order to have access to Ukrainian users’ data and to be able to censor them.
Ukrainian Internet operators hijacked
The population of Kherson, a city under the control of the Russian army, found itself connected to the Internet from Crimea after a power cut of several hours. It is the company specialized in the monitoring and the governance of Internet, NetBlocks, which makes the discovery last weekend.
Traffic from the Ukrainian operator Khersontelecom was redirected to the Crimean-based provider Miranda, which then sent traffic back to Rostelecom in Russia. ” Connectivity on the network was conducted via the Russian Internet instead of the Ukrainian telecommunications infrastructure and is therefore possibly subject to Russian Internet regulation, monitoring, and censorship “, explains NetBlocks on its site.
Three of the largest Internet providers in Ukraine have experienced serious infrastructure damage. However, the thousands of networks and abundant redundancy that make up the Ukrainian Internet made it incredibly resilient to the various attacks perpetrated by Russia during those two months.
Russia wants to control the entire Internet
Moscow’s goal behind these detour of infrastructures is to establish a sovereign and centralized Internet on which the Kremlin could exercise its censorship with impunity.
” In Russia, Internet traffic is regulated by Russian forces – they collect data and search for people who support Ukraine in order to break the resistance movement “, said Yurii Shchyhol, head of the state service of special communication and information protection of Ukraine. ” The enemy has fully understood that their mission is to eliminate Ukrainians’ access to their own Internet, and they have known how to do it since 2014. ”
In 2014, at the start of the Donbass war, telecommunications networks had already been hijacked to reroute data from the Ukrainian people to Moscow-backed pro-Russian separatist groups.
” These detour are part of the strategy of “Russification” of the territories occupied by the Russian army “, says Alp Toker, general manager of NetBlocks. ” Without a doubt, this is just the beginning. ”
