Фото: Reform.news
A major outage occurred in the Russian segment of the internet on the evening of April 6. The likely cause was a large-scale DDoS attack on Rostelecom’s network, the operator’s press service said.
“On the evening of April 6, a powerful DDoS attack on Rostelecom’s network was recorded. Incoming traffic filtering was introduced, which affected the availability of some internet resources. The actions of the cybercriminals were promptly neutralised,” the press service said.
The Russian segment of the internet experienced difficulties accessing gaming platforms, banking services and social networks. Problems were reported with the operation of servers for Steam, Battle.net and other global entertainment platforms.
Several hours after the start of the widespread outages among Rostelecom subscribers and the collapse of Roskomnadzor infrastructure, alarming signals also began coming from Belarus, digital-report.ru reported.
“The main partners of Belarus’ National Traffic Exchange Centre are Russia’s top-tier backbone giants. When deep packet inspection algorithms begin to fail at Russian nodes or government gateways go down because of errors in configuring TSPU equipment, the transit channel inevitably comes under direct pressure. User data simply cannot get through the filters frozen at the eastern borders,” the publication explained.
An additional factor behind the technical vulnerability is the localisation of content delivery networks. Many foreign gaming corporations, including Valve and Blizzard, optimise server response times for the Eastern European region by renting caching capacity on Russian cloud platforms.
The collapse of backbone networks inside the Russian internet automatically makes these nodes inaccessible for Belarusian IP addresses as well. Network security engineers note that the routing failure on April 6 may have triggered a so-called BGP route leak, in which incorrect data on information transfer paths instantly spread to neighbouring autonomous systems. Under such conditions, the digital border between countries disappears, and a technical incident in one state agency paralyses providers in another country.
Telecommunications specialists predict that as Russia’s internal traffic filtering mechanisms become more complex, neighbouring states will increasingly feel the side effects of other countries’ technical experiments. National infrastructure that relies heavily on external transit channels through a single neighbour loses the ability to maintain resilience independently during times of crisis.