1/We should be preparing for ways the internet may be attacked. We rely heavily on stable global access to social media and news sites for sense-making and intelligence. That may be disrupted. Here are a few things we might expect in the coming weeks and months.
2/Ukraine may be cut off from the internet or restricted to Russia ASNs. While workarounds for that may be found, they may be fragile and temporary. Expect up to a full comms blackout from Ukraine for the standard internet. This may depend on Rus ability to control chokepoints.
3/Obviously everyone is expecting massive cyber attacks. That could attack critical infrastructure like power and transportation, but also could target US social media like Twitter or Facebook. We have seen that both are deeply vulnerable to attack.
4/Transatlantic cables on the sea bed may be a target. This may functionally disconnect Europe from US social media for a time, depending on what bandwidth remains, and where. While conventional news outlets can persist using satellite media, much internet traffic is terrestrial.
5/The west may be entirely disconnected from Russia’s internet, except for specific western-facing media channels and disinformation operations. But expect no access to sites like vKontakte. Overall the lack of social media would be designed to enhance uncertainty and unease.
6/And companies need to be very alert to sabotage and supply chain attacks from the inside. Saudi has made many inroads into Twitter in the past, and the attack surface on Facebook is vast. Recall just months ago when they took themselves down with incompetent engineering.
7/Worth thinking through how the west might “route around” a series of outages such as this to try to preserve our communications and sense-making capacity without some of these tools. We would be naive not to think these things are possible. And this is just a quick survey.
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