Great Firewall fears as Russia plans to cut itself off from internet

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Great Firewall fears as Russia plans to cut itself off from internet

Moscow says temporary disconnection is a test of its cyberdefence capabilities

Alex Hern in London and Marc Bennetts in Moscow
Tue 12 Feb 2019 12.52 GMT

Russia is planning to temporarily disconnect from the internet as part of what it says is an experiment to test its cyberdefence capabilities.

According to a report on the Russian news site RBC, the planned disconnection is intended to analyse the country’s preparedness for a draft law mandating a “sovereign” internet.

Under the draft law, all internal internet traffic would be carried within the country’s own networks. Any traffic that leaves Russia would be forced to go thorough registered exchange points, subject to regulation by the state communications regulator Roskomnadzor.

Ostensibly the goal of the legislation is to protect the Russian internet from the US, which has an offensive cybersecurity strategy and lists Russia as one of the major sources of hacking attacks.

However, many observers think the creation of a Russian intranet is a further step towards a goal of duplicating the Great Firewall of China to restrict the access of the country’s internet users to content deemed harmful by the authorities.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/12/great-firewall-fears-as-russia-plans-to-cut-itself-off-from-internet

[flying_wahini]

1. Russia may be able to block the outside news for short periods but this sounds like

A long term failure. Too many people could figure out ways around it. Couldn’t they?

[mitch96]

2. could they be afraid of retaliation from what they did to our elections??

I bet the alphabet soup of agencies could put a hurting on them if needed..
m