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If there’s one big lesson about internet availability, it might be coming from Ukraine, where more than a year of Russian attacks have failed to bring down the network.
According to a study by ThousandEyes, which is part of Cisco, the repeated attempts to disrupt access to key Ukrainian web sites have occasionally succeeded, but only for short periods.
The most effective defensive strategy proved to be hosting content on global providers’ infrastructure, which demonstrated the most resilience overall, according to ThousandEyes’ “Ukraine Internet Analysis – March 2023”.
“Network-level disruptions were negligible, and the application-layer security in place for most of these sites allowed targeted blocking of traffic (e.g., Russia locations), while enabling the sites to remain largely available to legitimate users,” the study said.
ThousandEyes found two other hosting options—regional providers outside Ukraine and hosting within Ukraine—to be less resilient.
To gather data between February 2022 to March 2023, ThousandEyes monitored scores of Ukraine banking, government, and media web sites from vantage points in Kyiv and Kharkiv in Ukraine, Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, and from others around the world.
Connecting to the sites’ web servers to check on their availability and how well the pages were able to load revealed the health of the sites from a network and application perspective, according to Angelique Medina, Head of Internet Intelligence, Cisco ThousandEyes.
It also revealed actions Ukraine network administrators were taking to make their sites less susceptible to disruption. For example, in the weeks leading up to the war, some of these sites – the banking sites in particular – started migrating their content to global providers. Then the war started, and “we saw many more in the following weeks,” Medina said.
Those global providers are difficult to overwhelm via DDoS assault at a network layer…
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