1/ Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centres are having a severe impact due to the highly centralised nature of Russia's digital economy, in contrast to Ukraine's decentralised approach. Fears are growing that it could cause a banking crisis. ⬇️ bsky.app
Ukraine's new campaign of destroying Russia's data centers will prove devastating for Putin's economy and war machine if the White House is unable to prevent it. The chaos we're already seeing across Russia is only four days into the campaign and 3 facilities targeted.
2/ The Russian government has invested tens of billions of rubles in developing a 'sovereign Internet' where online services are hosted centrally in a limited number of giant data centres, rather than being spread across a range of domestic and foreign infrastructure. 3/ This approach has effectively prioritised the state's ability to control the Internet over resilience for online services, a vulnerability which Ukraine is now exploiting (and which is discussed in detail in this linked thread). bsky.app
1/ Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres have started a "data centre war" for which Russia is ill-prepared, argues a Russian warblogger. He forecasts a disastrous collapse of Russia's digital economy if Ukraine's retaliatory attacks on Russian data centres continue. ⬇️
4/ Russian warblogger 'Ratio Militaris' highlights the problems which the drone strikes are causing: "Recent days have revealed another critical vulnerability in Russian infrastructure, and that vulnerability is Yandex's data centres." 5/ "Over the past week, data centres in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir have suffered extensive damage, resulting in serious problems with Yandex Taxi, Yandex Cloud, Yandex Pay, Yandex Food, Yandex Maps, Yandex Mail, and other services. 6/ "Yandex's corporate clients who used its cloud services were also affected, as were anyone else who relied on the data centres in one way or another: information systems for Russian Railways, large supermarket chains, banks, and others were affected. 7/ "Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created that had long been one of Russia's advantages compared to even Western countries, has proven to be a weak link—including, and even primarily, due to hypercentralisation—both at the market level, where Yandex had become… 8/ …a powerful monopolist, and at the level of specific infrastructure solutions, where the entire power of the information giant was concentrated in a few (the exact number is no secret, but perhaps inappropriate to specify) large nodes—those aforementioned data centres. 9/ "It should be emphasised that centralisation was the key to Yandex's success, even though experts had long warned about the dangers of concentrating large volumes of critical information and the capacity to process it. 10/ "True, such concerns were typically linked to economic and quasi-economic considerations—for example, the idea that a single company would acquire excessive market power. 11/ "However, under wartime conditions, Yandex's strength dialectically turned into its weakness—and simultaneously the weakness of Russia as a whole. 12/ "It's noteworthy that the strikes on Russian data centres were clearly retaliation by the Ukrainian Armed Forces for the strikes on data centres in Ukraine. 13/ "The problem is that the Ukrainian information infrastructure was initially significantly more decentralised, meaning it had fewer vulnerable nodes that, if disabled, could bring down the entire infrastructure. 14/ "It's rather odd that those responsible for planning military operations, when launching attacks on Ukrainian data centres, failed to provide any response measures for the highly anticipated countermeasures. 15/ "Moreover, these measures clearly couldn't have been limited to simply strengthening air defences—simply because the technical feasibility of creating an air defence system that would fully protect even a few facilities is simply not feasible today: … 16/ …in a competition between armour and projectiles in modern warfare, the projectile clearly wins. 17/ "And if we consider measures that could have been taken, we're primarily talking about decentralising and concealing the information infrastructure, for example, replacing one large data centre with several smaller ones, placing them in secure facilities,… 18/ …including underground ones, and even siting them abroad, for that matter! Yes, it's expensive—tens of billions of rubles—and this is precisely the case when a company critical to the functioning of the state could count on government support. 19/ "After all, the state budget did have 20 billion rubles to improve the internet filtering system to block certain websites, apps, and internet services, including Telegram. So, it could have been used to address such a crucial task as ensuring the resilience… 20/ …of the information infrastructure. This is especially true given that "decision-making centres" and their technical departments were preparing for actions that clearly could trigger symmetrical attacks on similar targets. 21/ "Otherwise, we end up with a paradoxical situation: the filtering system is in place, but there may be nothing to filter." The risks to the Russian economy go far beyond an inability for customers to order pizzas and taxis, as 'LikbeZ' points out: 22/ "The consequences affected digital services and financial transactions. A telling example is Yandex Pay. After the attack on 11 October, customers were unable to check their balances, pay for purchases, or transfer money. 23/ "By the evening, the app had partially recovered, but funds remained inaccessible for transactions. The company assured that account data was saved, but did not provide a timeframe for a full restoration. 25/ "And the extent to which banks' backup systems are protected from large-scale damage is publicly unknown. If technical paralysis coincides with depositor panic, the liquidity crisis could spread throughout the entire banking system. 26/ "Sanctions and equipment shortages will further complicate recovery. Then, the problem of access to funds risks becoming a shock to the Russian economy." /end Sources: 🔹 t.me 🔹 t.me