Ukraine wants Russia’s domains off the net, contacts ICANN with a request

I’ve read this article recently, and it came up in some discussions with folks in passing when talking to them about what i’ve read and how some people may be a little concerned about what is going on.

The article is titled Security experts say Ukraine’s request to shut down Russian domains could hurt civilians which comes from Cyberscoop.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the article.

Ukrainian officials sent an urgent request Monday to the nonprofit that stewards domain and IP systems key to the global internet, but security experts are warning that it’s not as simple as it looks.

Ukraine asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to shut down Russian top-level domains — such as those with the .ru country code — in response to Russia’s use of the internet as a key attack surface for both information operations and cyberattacks.

ICANN has not yet responded to the request, Andrii Nabok, head of the expert group for the development of fixed broadband at Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and Ukraine’s representative to ICANN, confirmed in an email to CyberScoop.

I’ve not seen anything since this article, and since this came from Cyberscoop, I thought if there was an update, we’d hear about.

The email was first reported by Rolling Stone, and it is linked.

There are plenty of links that are available linking to other resources, so make sure you check this out.

Before I leave you, I do have a question. How could it hurt citizens when in fact, it could help them because they don’t have to hear their own government going after people. I would guess that since they use the same Internet that everyone else does, it could affect them because they couldn’t do anything and most of the domains from ISP’s would be from the top TLD.

I do agree with this paragraph which states:

“It’s the complete opposite of what we need,” security researcher Runa Sandvik told CyberScoop. “We should make sure that the Russian people are seeing
what is happening and what their government is doing.”

The problem here is that their citizens probably don’t care or they’re so sensitized by the fact that their government doing this type of thing is second nature.

I could agree that the ICANN company should not abuse power to delete things from the root zone because of political pressure. I could actually see both sides of this, and I hope that a mutual ground on this issue is ahead of us very soon.

Thanks so much for listening, reading and participating and we’ll see you all again!