Probably I'm just naive but I really don't understand this cyber warfare theater. Why aren't all internet operators in the free world just blackholing all russian ASNs (complete with the other allied bullies) from the internet routing tables? Wouldn't this be enough to avert all the nasty attacks on critical infrastructure?
If we did that, Russians wouldn't be reading HN and Twitter now and wouldn't be seeing images of abandoned/destroyed Russian vehicles, captive Russian soldiers, wounded civilians (who likely have Russian relatives). They probably wouldn't know that the tiny Ukrainian air force has downed multiple Russian aircrafts.
They wouldn't see the outpouring of support for the brave souls in Russia who take to the streets to protest the madness.
They wouldn't be able to keep contact with friends, family and ex-colleagues who can provide them with unfiltered (or at least with other filters applied) information.
This won't work at all. They'll just attack from a point of presence inside our borders. Any cyberattack that can be traced to a country is because they want it to be traced (eg to send a message)
It'll be a possible sanction because it will hurt the Russian population and businesses. But it won't avoid any cyberattack.
You'd have to cut literally every cable and satellite connection and radio transmission in and out of the country. With something as geographically distributed as Russia, that sounds very hard to convince every country to convince every operator to... and even then, there's some wireless options.
Presumably there's a Pareto 20% (or smaller I'd imagine) of connections that carry 80% of the traffic? At very least the increased latency of being forced onto suboptimal paths would be a statement
Sure, but whose traffic is truly going to be disrupted? There's a reason they had this stuff about being less dependent in the past, I seem to remember they disconnected DNS traffic to the outside for a day as a test a few years ago. This 80% will impact the netflix/youtube streams, video takes a lot of bandwidth (megabits per second) compared to push-to-talk audio (kilobits per second) or plain text (~21 bytes per second is the average american reading speed). Sure there will be overhead and webpages are crazy nowadays so you need more than 21B/s, but e.g. email can work very easily on 20% of the typical bandwidth (probably also 2%, but it depends on the specifics, e.g. QoS would help a lot there).
And even if you reduced it to a few megabits snuck in and out for the whole country, the military would use that and what's impacted is civilians. Bad for the economy? Meh, if all countries were already convinced to be against russia, then trade would be at a standstill and no comms for civilians would not matter that much financially.
That's not to say it's not worth a try, but I expect it won't be effective, or if it is, I'm skeptical that it would hinder them much more than any traditional trade limits already could.
I don't think it's necessary to physically cut cables.
What if critical infrastructure is isolated from savages by just not having routes to/from them?
I mean, in a similar way the Team Cymru UTRS[1] works by publishing a list of BGP filters to be imported in routers.
Agreed, it was a metaphor and not really meant as a call for physical damage that would (presumably) later have to be fixed again anyway. I should have written that more clearly.
Russia has a lot of spy satellites. A bunch of them could serve as bridges between Russia and regular homes in EU/US with a good fiber connection, datacentres, etc. Also microwave or fiber connections through the border to the many countries around them.
In the case of a hot war involving hundreds of thousands of troops and the 4th vs 7th largest militaries, maybe free access to papers isn't the most pressing issue.
Keeping as much communications channels open is of severe strategic interest. Transparency is a weapon of democracy. In the age of information media images can help in a war and cutting off any lines would only solidify the grasp of domestic propaganda for everyone.
There's a balancing act there. Open communications are strategic. However, bidirectional communication that can be used for cyberattacks is a weakness. I mean, how much citizen-to-citizen communication to Russians is worth compared to the cost and probability of a well-organized cyberattack.
