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Earlier this month, Russian telecoms regulator Roscomnadzor said it would start blocking VPN providers, including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and IPVanish, to prevent access to information the government wants to censor. It now appears that various online services including BitTorrent and Twitch have been disrupted with various parties pointing to Russia's blocking tools.
For the past several years, as part of the country's website blocking efforts, Russian authorities have warned that VPN providers could be next on the list.
According to Russia, the problem is that these services can provide access to material that it prefers that citizens do not see, from pirated content to terrorist propaganda.
In the opinion of the authorities, VPN providers should cooperate with the government, but many are not happy to do so, especially if it involves some kind of monitoring or censorship of services that Russia finds offensive.
After doing broad threats Against a variety of services in 2019, Russia followed through on its warnings by blocking two providers, VyprVPN and OperaVPN. Then earlier this month local telecoms regulator Roscomnadzor said it would block several more, including Nord VPN, ExpressVPN, IPVanish, Hello! VPN, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited and Speedify VPN.
Russia anticipated there would be problems
Before blocking the providers listed above, Russia reached out to the banking sector to ensure that any blockages would not harm its activities. The Central Bank then contacted related companies and asked them to confirm the names of the VPN services they use, if any, along with the purpose of that use and known IP addresses.
According to a report by RBCRoscomnadzor reported that it planned to "implement a set of measures to restrict the use of services", and the information was necessary "to exclude VPN connections from access restriction policies."
According to Roscomnadzor, it received responses from 64 industry organizations, 27 of which use the aforementioned VPN connections to support 33 technology processes. "More than 100 IP addresses were submitted to be excluded from access restriction policies," the watchdog reported.
However, despite these efforts, it appears that Russia's attempt to block suppliers may have overshot the mark.
Reported outage in various online services
After the new locks went into effect, several online services reported that they were experiencing connectivity issues. According to a Kommersant report, these include the World of Tanks game, Twitch game streaming service, Flash Scores (a service used to access soccer scores and results), and even BitTorrent transfers. The operators of the MMO World of Warships game posted on their portal to explain the issues.
โAt the beginning of September, by order of Roscomnadzor, Internet providers began to block VPN services. The DPI team is used to execute orders from suppliers. " they write.
โIn the process of blocking VPN services, many UDP ports were affected, including those that have been used in our game since the start of the first alpha test. This situation has affected not only the large backbone providers, but also many premises, of which there are a large number in the territory of Russia โ.
World of Warships says that blocking UDP ports prevented people from logging into their game and also caused disconnections for people who were already playing. Those affected should contact their ISPs, the company says, but whether this is yielding positive results is unknown.
Twitch did not respond to a request for comment, but FlashScore says it has had issues as well. However, despite investigations, he still had to determine what had caused the technical problems.
Roscomnadzor Denies Blame, ISPs Not So Sure
Russia's telecommunications watchdog says that despite claims to the contrary, it believes the network problems did not appear as a result of its work.
"By implementing measures to block VPNs, the specified UDP ports were not blocked," said a spokesperson. Sources within various ISPs in Russia are not so secure.
"[S]The Big Four operators said that they had already tested their own networks and that the reason for the difficulties was the operation of the TSPU (technical means to counter threats) equipment, which Roskomnadzor installed in the networks under the law of 'Sovereign RUnet'โKommersant reports.
Provider blocking is only part of Russia's stance towards VPNs
What reported In June, Russia is attacking VPNs on multiple fronts. Every week, Roscomnadzor sends orders to Google to remove hundreds of URLs for sites and services that reportedly allow access to pirated content.
Unfortunately, Russian law allows Google to share the precise URLs you are targeting, but search the Lumen database confirm the existence of demolitions that affected more than half a million links in the last two years.
