The Russian Web and Casualties

Russia has been signaling for some time that it intends to close Russia from the global web. They can’t do this to North Koreans because every Russian almost has a smartphone. So this toda6 was not precise a surprise once both posts came through

What Russia intends to do is geofence the country. This is precisely what China is doing as well. But first, they needed to create some pain. So here is post number one:

The biggest glitch in RuNet is that sites with the .ru domain are unavailable

Yandex websites, a number of news portals, banking applications, taxis and deliveries do not work. Clients of large Russian operators, as well as compatriots abroad, for example, in Europe and Armenia, complain about problems with access.

In specialized communities they write that the failure may be associated with DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) — this protocol is used to increase the security of sites. For example, to prevent attackers from replacing data or a site’s IP address.

So this one came about an hour later:

The Coordination Center for .RU/.РФ domains confirms that the breakdown of the Runet is associated with the DNSSEC protocol

Now they are “working to eliminate the problem,” writes Fontanka.