Claudflare, an American company that provides content delivery network and DDoS mitigation services, said it will continue to operate in Russia, despite its condemning stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and mounting pressure to terminate services inside Russia.
“We have received several calls to terminate all of Cloudflare's services inside Russia. We have carefully considered these requests and discussed them with government and civil society experts. Our conclusion, in consultation with those experts, is that Russia needs more Internet access, not less.
As the conflict has continued, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in requests fr om Russian networks to worldwide media, reflecting a desire by ordinary Russian citizens to see world news beyond that provided within Russia,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post.
“Indiscriminately terminating service would do little to harm the Russian government, but would both limit access to information outside the country, and make significantly more vulnerable those who have used us to shield themselves as they have criticized the government.”
However, Claudflare announced it took some measures to protect customers data in Eastern Europe during ongoing armed conflict. More specifically, the company has removed all customer encryption keys from data centers located in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, and deployed its Keyless SSL technology, which allows encryption sessions to be terminated in a secure data center away from wh ere there may be a risk of compromise.
As for the second measure, Cloudflare has configured all servers located in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to automatically brick in case of a power loss and internet connection disruption.
“All data on disk is encrypted with keys that are not stored on site. Bricked machines will not be able to be booted unless a secure, machine-specific key that is not stored on site is entered,” the company explained.
Cybersecurity Help’s statement on the critical situation in Ukraine
On February 24, people in many cities and towns across Ukraine woke up to the sounds of explosions and artillery fire, as the Russian Federation launched a full-scale invasion of the country. Such actions are unacceptable, political ambitions of any man aren’t worth of blood, tears, and destruction of millions of lives. We give our full support to the Ukrainian people in these hard times. No more war! Слава Україні!