Laws and regulations

Russian internet watchdog Roskomnadzor bans six more VPN services

Russia’s internet watchdog, ‘Roskomnadzor’, has announced the ban of other VPN products, 15 VPN services are now illegal in Russia

Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor tightens the control over the Internet and blocked access to six more VPN services. The latest banned services are Betternet, Lantern, X-VPN, Cloudflare WARP, Tachyon VPN, PrivateTunnel.

The total number of banned VPN products reached 15, below is the full list of blocked services:

  • Hola! VPN
  • ExpressVPN
  • KeepSolid VPN Unlimited
  • Nord VPN
  • Speedify VPN
  • IPVanish VPN
  • VyprVPN
  • Opera VPN
  • ProtonVPN
  • Betternet
  • Lantern
  • X-VPN
  • Cloudflare WARP
  • Tachyon VPN
  • PrivateTunnel

Russia’s internet watchdog sent a request to inform the Center for Monitoring and Control of the Public Communications Network about the ban of the services from the systems of all registered Russian companies and public organizations.

The companies were banned because they did not meet the demand of the Roskomnadzor to connect their systems to the Federal State Information System (FGIS).

In September Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor blocked access to Hola!VPN, ExpressVPN, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited, Nord VPN, Speedify VPN, and IPVanish VPN.

Russian communications watchdog argued that VPNs could be abused for illegal activities online, including terrorism and child pornography. However, the watchdog made some exceptions for companies that leverage VPNs for their operations, for this reason, the regulator created a white list of software and apps that will be able to continue using VPN providers.

Russians ordinary use VPN services and other anonymizing services to access blocked content and bypass censorship, in the following graph we can see the continuous growth for the number of Tor users in Russia.

In 2017, Russia’s parliament voted to ban web tools that could be used by people to surf outlawed websites, and the Duma approved the proposed bill to oblige anyone using an online message service to identify themselves with a telephone number.

The bill prohibited the use of any service from the Russian territory if they could be used to access blacklisted websites.

VPN operators and proxy services operating in the country must register themselves with the Government regularity authority.

Since May 3rd, 2018, Russia’s media and communication regularity authority Roskomnadzor blocked over 50 virtual private networks (VPNs), Web Proxies and Anonymizing networks.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, VPN services)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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