- A 500 GB leak reveals China’s “Great Firewall in a box” Sold to Four Countries
- The turnkey DPI -kit detects and blocks VPN traffic
- Citizens are facing tighter online limits, with some VPNs struggling to bypass blocks
A massive violation of data has revealed that China is selling the same Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology that drives its large firewall to four authoritarian regimes.
On September 11, 2025, Leakage comes from Geedge Networks, a company linked to the development of China’s large firewall. More than 100,000 documents – and 500 GB of data – revealing detailed drawings of filtration and DPI technology that operates China’s Internet censorship system.
China’s movement marks a strategic shift from domestic control to a commercial export model that makes money on censorship. It provides authoritarian governments with a ready -made playbook for closing foreign media, enforcement of state narratives and suppression of dissent, deeply affects citizens and their digital freedoms.
Although the best VPN services help fight censorship, they face growing matches against still strict restrictions.
A “large firewall in a box”
The Chinese government is notorious for using the large firewall to regulate all online activity within its limits.
Firewall also uses DNS manipulation, IP blockage, keyword filtering and real-time traffic formation to create a comprehensive barrier that blocks foreign news sites, social media platforms and any other content considered politically insensitive, all under the logging of user activity for state monitoring.
The Great Firewall of China (GFW) today experienced the largest internal document leakage in its history. More than 500 GB source code, work logs and internal communication have been postponed, which reveals details of the development and operation of gfw.the -leakage derives from… pic.twitter.com/dadddtkz7wSeptember 13, 2025
Geedge Networks, whose main scientist Fang Binxing has been called “Father of the Great Firewall”, produces hardware, firmware and proprietary secure gateway software running the DPI engine.
The Mesa Laboratory at the Institute of Information Engineering contributed algorithms that learn the large firewall for tools used to bypass censorship such as VPNs and proxy tools.
Together they form a turnkey-one complete, ready to use product-as researchers in the Great Firewall report describe as a “large firewall in a box.”
Investigators gathered the export track by crossing referral to three data sources: Last manifests, data center footprints and code technootations.
Citizens are facing new censorship barriers as VPNs are struggling to bypass blocks
The arrival of a ready -made Great Firewall Kit in countries already known for limited internet freedom changes everyday internet life for millions.
Constant monitoring erodes privacy and can put citizens, especially activists, journalists and warnings, at risk simply to speak freely.
Even the most robust virtual private networks (VPN) tools are fighting against China’s layered defense, as deep -learning classifiers that can spot connection protocols. The exported DPI engine inspects real -time traffic, recognizes the distinctive handshakes used by many commercial VPNs, and either throttle speeds or blocks the connection directly.
Nevertheless, users in the affected places can still bypass restrictions with the best VPNs for China, all of which use advanced VPN connection tactics. Some, such as NordVPN and Proton VPN, have even introduced custom stealth protocols to tackle this challenge.
It’s a classic game of cat-and-mouse. As censorship grows more sophisticated, VPN developers must constantly develop to remain one step ahead and help citizens access a free internet.
