Ukranian Hackers Managed to Nearly Destroy Russian Internet Provider

A regional Russian internet provider called Nodex was almost completely destroyed by an attack by a Ukrainian hacking group. Nodex confirmed the attack in a statement on Russian social network VK, saying its network had been “devastated” and that it was working to restore infrastructure from backups.

The hacking group, known as the Ukrainian Cyber ​​Alliance, took credit for the attack, saying St. Petersburg-based NodeX was “completely looted and wiped out… while they were left with bare equipment without backups.” Cyber ​​attacks have long been the domain of countries like Russia and North Korea, using them to infiltrate domestic infrastructure like utility grids and, in North Korea’s case, even steal cryptocurrency to finance nuclear weapons development.

TechCrunch Ukraine earlier reported the attack and wrote that Nodex was offline as of 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, sovereign network. Last year, Russia’s federal internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, Internet access is restricted worldwide For a day in different parts of the country, especially the Muslim majority, even VPNs are blocked from reaching servers outside the country.

The Kremlin clearly wants to control the flow of information available to citizens during the ongoing war with Ukraine. Information about the war is heavily censored, with severe penalties for referring to it as anything other than “special operations”.

YouTube remains accessible in Russia, but with regular significant outages and slowdowns that critics say are the result of Deliberate throttling By the government to prevent viewing of certain content. Russia surely hopes that by blocking websites outside of its control, citizens will not stumble upon content that contradicts the Kremlin’s narrative and only consider it acceptable. News programs that spread Western ideas, such as Radio Free Europe, and online influence campaigns through social media can be Russianized if Russians are out of their reach.

That being said, attacks on Internet networks by Ukrainian groups may not be effective for long if Russia unplugs its ISPs from the rest of the world and further divides the world into isolated silos.