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A regional Russian Internet provider called Nodex was almost completely destroyed in an attack by a Ukrainian hacker group. Nodex confirmed the attack in a statement on the Russian social network VK, saying that its network had been “destroyed” and that it was working to restore the infrastructure from backups.
The hacker group, called the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, took credit for the attack, saying that St. Petersburg-based Nodex “was completely looted and wiped out … while empty equipment without backups was left behind “. Cyberattacks have long been the domain of countries such as Russia and North Korea, using them to infiltrate domestic infrastructure such as utility networks and, in the case of North Korea, even steal cryptocurrency to finance the development of nuclear weapons.
TechCrunch first reported about the Ukrainian attack and wrote that Nodex remains offline since Wednesday evening.
The attack comes as Russia continues to test the possibility of cutting off its citizens from the global web in favor of its own restricted and sovereign network. Last year, Russia’s federal internet regulatory agency, Roskomnadzor, restricted global internet access for a day in many regions of the country, especially those with a Muslim majority, even preventing VPNs from reaching servers outside the country.
The Kremlin understandably wants to manage the flow of information available to citizens during its ongoing war with Ukraine. Information about the war is heavily censored, with severe punishments for referring to it as anything more than a “special operation”.
YouTube has been accessible in Russia, but with regular significant outages and slowdowns that critics say are the result intentional throttling by the government to prevent the display of certain content. Russia surely hopes that by cutting off websites outside of its control, citizens will not stumble upon content that contradicts the Kremlin’s narrative and will only consider opinions it deems acceptable. News operations spreading Western ideas like Radio Free Europe, and online influence campaigns through social media can be neutralized if the Russians are simply cut off from their reach.
That’s all to say, attacks on Internet networks by Ukrainian groups may not be effective for long if Russia moves forward with unplugging its ISPs from the rest of the world, further dividing the world into disconnected silos.
