Russia is signaling it could take out the West's internet and GPS. There's no good backup plan.

Alteon@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 103 points –
Russia is signaling it could take out the West's internet and GPS. There's no good backup plan.
businessinsider.com
74

Bark bark bark

Yes, this is really like a tiny dog barking its head off, because it's convinced it can't be harmed.
Russia and Putin have been embarrassing themselves for a while now.

suuure, they couldn't even take out ukraines communication systems

Cutting a couple undersea fiber cables and completely fucking the whole internet is very easy. Humanity has so far just kinda silently agreed to not fuck with that.

Sure, but welcome to 2024, where we have mirrors and cdns and the cloud with distributed everything.

Not saying disconnecting the americas from eurasia wouldn't be a big deal, but the internet would keep working.

Elon would be very happy.

Im curious… how much undersea cable traffic could Starlink handle? I know the sat-sat laser links are just coming online now, what if every sat had them

Nkt sure, though most would go other existing high-speed satellite trunks.

would Americans even consider that taking down the internet? It wouldn't impact a US client talking to a US server.

I find the threat of GPS loss to be hard to believe. Theyd have to take out 38 GPS satelites and presumably any of the other navagation satellites American allies have in orbit, and presumably theyd have to not damage their own navigation satelites in the process. I also doubt they could do that all at the same time, or quick enough that no one could respond. Im sure they have the capability, and im sure they have an idea of what the operation would have to look like but in terms of a plan that's actionable, I have big doubts.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that threat.

They know exactly where in the sky they are. They know what frequencies their antennas are tuned to. I'm betting burning out those transceivers would not be an impossible feat.

I also don't know how well they put up against really large lasers

They've also been fully capable of putting s*** into space for years. I would not put it past them to have some form of combination weather/spy satellite and weapons platform out there.

They must be aware of the concept of re-ta-lia-tion. You shoot down my satellites, I shoot down yours. Nobody wins and we are all back 40 years.

Maybe they could get an compromised/friendly/useful idiot/individual installed in the hightest levels of government who, either intentionally or unintentionally, would funnel secrets to them which help facilitate mass disruption?

ohh wait...

How would they interfere with our elections without the Internet?

that's basically russia asking to get wiped out

It's like a mini MAAD...

To Putin, any significant threat to his power in Russia is destruction. Ukraine is making inroads as I type this, if they get too far into Russia, it could dominoe into Putin losing power.

If it ever actually looks close to that, he ain't going to be attacking Internet cables, he'll be launching nukes.

But once a nuke launches, it's over for all of us. So he needs an intermediate step that he could do and would fuck a bunch of shit up by doing, but it's not a nuclear bomb.

once a nuke launches, it's over for all of us

No, it really isn't. Nuclear winter and the idea of thousands of Tsar Bombas belongs to the 70s. Even in an all out nuclear war today using the full (working? - doubtful regarding Russia) arsenals it would be a catastrophe with hundreds of thousands of dead but mostly we'd be continuing on as before afterwards.

I grew up during "duck and cover" and iodine in the cupboard. That's not where we are anylonger.

Also rockets are a pain to maintain, theres a reason the US military is trying to move away from the minutemen over towards gravity controlled nukes. Does anyone think Russia can properly maintain theirs.

Uhhh I’m not trusting nobody named vault dweller about this particular topic

Its the fact that my name is vault dweller and not thw fact that my picture is of the Mer remover Pelinal Whitestake.

Anyways my name is a reference to Fallout one which is a lot more depressing about the whole apocalypse thing, tonally its probably closer to a boy and his dog. I dont fear the bomb but I aint welcoming it either.

If life taught me anything it is that all you need to do is hide under your desk, duck, and cover. You can survive anything from a tornado to nuclear holocaust with that one.

So you're saying if the Russians struck Manhattan it would be relatively little impact. You think of the ten thousand nukes the US and Russia have on average will kill less than a hundred people. Or if just Russia, less than two hundred people per.

I think each nuke is tens of thousands of immediate deaths followed by hundreds of thousands of mid to long term radiation fatalities. If we pretend that 25% of their 5000 or so nukes works, that's still 1250 nukes. If each nuke of that 1250 works and kills 100,000 each, that's 125 million people. I don't think this is so far fetched given that a little over 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

I just don't know how a society can recover if the majority of it's urban centers gets nuked and there is residual radiation there for the foreseeable future. Japan recovered because the nukes were small and there was only two sites, and that still caused about 110,000 casualties.

How many submarines do you think they have in the Atlantic and Pacific with nuclear strike capabilities? How many nukes do you think are in range of major north american cities?

Most nukes are targeted at the other side's nukes. Those aren't in population centers.

You have no idea how interconnected the world is, do you? How reliant the US is on its ports. Not just any place on a coastline is big enough to pull a cargo ship up to, as well as having the infrastructure to unload it and coordinate all that. All they have to do is hose every port capable of handling cargo ships and we are entirely fucked. The cherry on top would be nuking the oil refineries, completely wiping out our ability to move goods even if the ports were open. We will not have enough food to feed the country within a few days. Mass starvation starts a week or so afterwards. Two to three weeks later and at least a quarter or more of Americans will be dead from starvation. Then comes the massive waves of diseases due to all the unburied dead. Inside of two months at least half of America will be dead or dying. More likely to be closer to three-quarters.

All out nuclear is not something we survive.

Then comes the massive waves of diseases due to all the unburied dead.

I think the literal flood of shits due to failed sewer system will hit us first in big cities.

but mostly we'd be continuing on as before afterwards.

Congratulations, this is officially the most stupid thing I have read on the internet, ever.

What?

You really need to look up the yields of modern ones compared to what's been used...

Have you? Or have you fallen for russian influence operations?

The ~1500 or so nuclear weapons Russia and the USA have in active service each are mostly much smaller tactical nukes compared to the insane my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours stuff that happened in the 60s.

Putin won't do that. It's been made very clear to him he has 2 choices in that scenario, leave power peacefully for the old dictators home, or attempt to launch his nukes and immediately get yeeted by the USAF. Possibly the USN if he's vacationing near a coastal area. It's been made known to him that he does not have the operational security to keep the CIA from tracking him at all times and that his location would be target number 1 in such a situation.

What? The whole fuckin internet is the backup plan

Like bro do you even BGP?

Like bro do you even BGP?

BGP works under assumption that everyone involved acts in good faith and that good faith can be, and in specific cases in history was, severely abused.

So it is likely it will be part of the problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking

So Ivan Sabotageovich calls up someone who works at Level3

Says "Hey broski I want you to start announcing bogus BGP routes"

Guy who answers the phone says "What? Why would I do that?"

Guy on the phone says "I'll give you rubles"

Guy who answers the phone says my brother in Christ I make $175k per year and I will get fired and they'll fix it in about 25 minutes anyway, sorting out and fixing stuff like this is kind of why people like me are employed here and there are a lot of us watching what happens

Guy on the phone says I can also give you TONS of unrefined crude oil and methane, or precision aircraft parts from the 1990s

Guy who answers says I need to go now, good luck though

Guy on the phone says blyat as the line goes dead

No, Ivan will just announce "hey, I have direct link into these ASs" and lot of parties will believe him, consider him shortest route and send him lot of traffic intended for said ASs.

That's what china did in 2010 when they hijacked about 15% of all world's traffic.

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=mca

... for 18 minutes

With their existing infrastructure in the US which Russia doesn't have

And it was detected (and was trivial to fix once detected it sounds like) even before people were particularly alerted to this as a possibility

18 minutes is a lot in some coordinated multiple-vector attack

You are ignoring the possibility of blackmail though.

Have you seen what happens on the global interchange when just one cable gets interrupted? It's absolute chaos. That's all they want. They aren't trying to absolutely isolate Internet from the US and it's allies, we have all kinds of satellite backups for things like that.

I mean you are correct that things like this are a shit show if you are directly involved, but my point is that the wider world can continue fairly unimpeded. Unless they have some kind of magic backhoe that can cut every backbone cable all at once or something, I think the impact in terms of bringing the West's telecommunications to its knees is going to be more or less nil.

All they need is to send subs around and attach charges ahead of time and blow them all at once. The problem is the time constraints of figuring out exactly where the cables got cut. I believe they have somewhat solved this, but I don't think it's bulletproof. The chaos is really the goal though.

Have you seen what happens on the global interchange when just one cable gets interrupted?

I have. Usually.the network tries to route around it, with best effort delivery. This keeps the outage localized and is part of network standards. You can expect delay, though. I guess I don't see what you're getting at.

You're just talking about route healing. They mean to disrupt long standing communications, which doesn't resolve itself in the same way. BGP works fine for peered connections, but not at a global scale like this. It can take many hours and lots of manual intervention to quiet things down. Do that a few times at regular intervals, and it could be days.

I've worked international voice and data networks and I can't imagine the number of points of presence they would have to hit in your dream scenario. They simply couldn't do it without going to war, when this effort would give way to plans of survival.

That's kind of their point. They do dumb shit like to provoke and prod. They've been randomly jamming GOS for years for no reason, and cutting these cables as well. It's just a flexnto let people know if it comes to that, then they might do something. It's the same reason they run their subs just loud enough to be detected around the north seas, and then go silent.

You don't understand. They're just talking shit. They are very aware of what they have to do to start a war with the west. Yet they don't because they know that it'll last 20 minutes.

Yes, you are saying the same thing I am. Not sure why you're even replying. It's a flex.

I don't know if it was you, but I first responded to someone who indicated that losing a network link causes chaos. That is not true. Then they fantasize that a number of links are involved, which is near impossible1

Russia has become the embarrassing relative you hate seeing at holiday gatherings.

In the Julia Roberts move "Leave the World Behind", they mention a process of destroying a country. (I vaguely recall that the process was attributed to a real person.) One of the steps was to take down the internet. With lack of information chaos develops, and the country destroys itself.

i feel like taking down the internet is harder than it sounds. you could easily disrupt satellite, but the world will route around this... its actually designed for it.

they would have to poison dns or major routing points somehow.

Cut communication trunks to knock out the internet in wide areas should still be an option since storms cause those outages for non-wireless internet now. DDOS and other atracks can still overwhelm wireless communications.

But honestly it is unlikely that being technically possible would be as successful in practice as a widespread attack as most places have a lot of redundancy built in because these kinds of threats have been around for decades.

Nice plot, but with the presence of radio and television I see a hole in that plan

Not really. We had a country before the internet, we'd just fall back on that. It would be painful but very doable.

They’re afraid to use their glide bombs in Kursk because they’re not accurate enough to avoid hitting their own friendlies and they think they can hit a satellite moving ten of thousand + miles an hour in orbit!? lol

For real. People talking like Russia is going to jam GPS or something, while they can’t even jam GPS or RF well enough to prevent FPV drones from slamming in to their own people. I just saw a video of a Ukrainian FPV drone taking out a Russian EW platform that’s purpose built to counter drones for fucks sake.

Edit - oh. This statement was from Medvedev back in June. lol ok bro. How you gonna run those sub generators you need to fuck with those cables when all your diesel is currently burning off in a fucking epic conflagration? Your country is literally cooked rn.

Just imagine the outrage if Russia is the reason that tiktok goes down

I really don’t think they have the capability, actually. They might be able to degrade the network, but I don’t think they would be able to actually physically destroy enough elements of the constellation to make it generally useless.

Not to mention, I’d be a bit shocked if the DoD doesn’t have some backups sitting quietly (as in: not broadcasting at the moment) in geosync. After all, it’s the first rule of government spending.

The Russians talk shit everyday. It ends up that it's either something that they can't technically do, as it is here, or something that would would result in having their ass handed to them.

The same Russia that "indicated" the Ukraine special operation would take three days?

Lol

The internet was literally created by the DoD to have a communication system that was resilient to foreign attacks. If one part of it goes down, it can still work with the parts that aren't down. This is built into the design.

Yeah?

And we'd retaliate. Which is why they haven't done it. They didn't shoot down the satellites in the cold war and they aren't going to do it now unless they've decided the world without satellites is just so much better.

How is this news? China could nuke the West Coast tomorrow and the Canadians might invade Maine to secure a maple syrup monopoly! Actually, that's more likely than anything else in this thread...

Maine should just be part of New Brunswick but your decorators could never match the right shade of pink

If Canada invades I'm fighting on their side. We suck so much and they're polite.