The Russian government is taking control of Ukraine’s Internet infrastructure and redirecting traffic to Russian operators in order to gain access to Ukrainian user data and be able to censor it.
Ukrainian internet operators hijacked
The population of Kherson, a city under the control of the Russian army, found themselves connected to the Internet from Crimea after a power cut lasting several hours. It was the company specializing in Internet monitoring and governance, NetBlocks, which made the discovery last weekend.
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⚠️ Confirmed: Metrics indicate that internet connectivity on provider Skynet (Khersontelecom) in Russian-occupied Kherson, south Ukraine, has been partially restored and rerouted via Russia’s Rostelecom instead of Ukrainian infrastructure.
? Background: https://t.co/S0qJQ7CbNv pic.twitter.com/WhlSNODuqw
—NetBlocks (@netblocks) May 1, 2022
Traffic from the Ukrainian operator Khersontelecom was redirected to the provider Miranda, located in Crimea, which then returned 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, surveillance and censorship “says NetBlocks on his site.
Three of the largest Internet service providers in Ukraine have suffered serious damage to their infrastructure. However, the thousands of networks and the abundant amount of redundancy that make up the Ukrainian Internet have made it incredibly resilient to the various attacks perpetrated by Russia during these two months.
Russia wants to control the entire internet
Moscow’s objective behind these infrastructure hijackings is to establish a sovereign and centralized Internet on which the Kremlin could exercise its censorship with complete impunity.
” In Russia, internet traffic is regulated by Russian forces – they collect data and track people who support Ukraine in order to break the resistance movement said Yurii Shchyhol, head of Ukraine’s State Service for Special Communication and Information Protection. ” The enemy fully understood that their mission was 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 in order to reroute the data of the Ukrainian people to pro-Russian separatist groups supported by Moscow.
” These hijackings are part of the strategy of “Russification” of the territories occupied by the Russian army “says Alp Toker, CEO of NetBlocks. ” Without a doubt, this is just the beginning. »