Russia on Monday announced it had successfully disconnected the country from the worldwide internet in a series of tests to determine whether Russia's national intranet infrastructure could function without access to the global DNS system and the external Internet, BBC reports.

The tests, which turned Russia's internet, RuNet, into the largest intranet in the world, were meant to simulate how the country would respond in case of a foreign cyber-attack.

The upcoming test was meant to measure "the possibility of intercepting subscriber traffic and revealing information about the subscriber, blocking communication services," according to a document that was posted to a well-known Russian Telegram channel concerning IT issues, and later verified by Open Media.

Professor Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at the University of Surrey, expressed concerns about the tests.

"Sadly, the Russian direction of travel is just another step in the increasing breaking-up of the internet," he told the BBC.

"Increasingly, authoritarian countries which want to control what citizens see are looking at — what Iran and China have already done. It means people will not have access to dialogue about what is going on in their own country, they will be kept within their own bubble."

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