SBA @ ACM IMC 2025
End of October, Florian Holzbauer, researcher at SBA Research an the Security and Privacy Research Group at the University of Vienna, presented his paper Tracking Internet Disruptions in Ukraine: Insights from Three Years of Active Full Block Scans at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
© Niklaus Schnaubelt
Abstract
Numerous disruptions to Internet access have been reported during the war in Ukraine, including large-scale outages, damage to network infrastructure, surveillance, and censorship measures. However, most observations rely on local reports or monitoring systems within Ukraine. In this paper, we investigate whether the conflict’s impact on Internet connectivity can be observed externally, from a vantage point outside Ukraine. Focusing on the Kherson region, which has remained on the frontline for over three years, we conduct an active measurement campaign probing the Ukrainian address space at two-hour intervals since March 2, 2022, the 7th day of the invasion, resulting in a country-wide dataset that spans the full duration of the conflict. Extending existing outage detection approaches, we infer three signals to detect Internet disruptions and refine the mapping of ASes and address blocks to specific regions. This allows us to assign disruptions to oblasts with greater confidence. Our results demonstrate that Internet disruptions caused by the war can be measured remotely by any host connected to the Internet. Our analysis provides new insights into the resilience of small regional providers and identifies periods when Ukraine’s Internet infrastructure was under significant strain.
Authors
Florian Holzbauer, Sebastian Strobl, Johanna Ullrich
Links
Country Monitor
Conference Paper
Conference
ERIS Research Group