[1]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/has-age-digital-siege-begun-david-bar
   rett/?trk=public_post-content_share-article
   I won't claim to be any particularly adept student of modern history,
   but Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukraine seems to have triggered a
   digital counterattack without precedent. Not with the panoply of
   ridiculously-named (but truly terrifying) "cyberweapons" at each sides'
   disposal, but with a surprisingly mundane range of financial weapons
   (which should be named "finweaps" to add a testosterone-fueled edge).
   It makes me wonder if we're in for a new generation of "digital sieges"
   warfare, where there's no actual need to physically shut down an
   adversary's physical supply lines: you just take away their ability to
   pay.
   "De-SWIFTing" of Russian banks isn't a concept I'd ever really
   considered or heard discussed before a week ago, and now it seems like
   a dagger to the heart of the Russian economy. Russia has stockpiled one
   of the world's largest foreign currency reserves -- worth at least
   $600B -- which (to the degree I understand it) is intended to be used
   to preserve the value of the Russian Ruble, staving off a
   hyperinflation feedback loop that would have devastating effects
   domestically. But apparently the mechanism by which this strategy would
   be executed depends entirely on the SWIFT network of international wire
   transfers. Disable the ability of Russia to actually execute the
   purchases, and that $600B war-chest is effectively neutralized, locked
   within Russian vaults with no where to go.
   The idea of a banking protocol somehow bringing a superpower to its
   knees sounds far fetched, and surely wouldn't work by itself. But I
   wonder if it's just the first of many ways to "disconnect" Russia from
   the global economy? Some other options:
   * Identify every private jet currently in Russia, using the global
   transponder network. Blacklist those jets from landing at any "allied"
   airport, and if they do land anyway, just refuse to refuel them. We
   might render billions of dollars in oligarch aircraft hardware
   instantly useless.
   * Send an upgrade out to every iPhone and Android phone in the Russian
   empire, just turning it off until hostilities cease. An entire nation's
   ability to communicate internally grinds to a halt.
   * Identify every major internet peering relationship with Russia, and
   throttle its access to all allied services: Google, Facebook,
   Microsoft, Apple, all go offline.
   Bit by bit (literally, and figuratively) we might identify and disable
   every connection to the outside world, and turn it from a 1 to a 0. Can
   any nation truly survive digital isolation in today's competitive
   world? I wonder if it might be possible to lay siege to Russia entirely
   digitally, and win this war without firing a single shot -- without
   blockading a single harbor -- while establishing a sobering precedent
   for how to respond to "connected adversaries" in the future.

References

   1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/has-age-digital-siege-begun-david-barrett/?trk=public_post-content_share-article