- Major Russian internet services have been instructed how to block VPNs
- Russia’s Ministry of Digital highlighted a few “significant limitations”
- Attempts to restrict VPN usage may have caused a widespread banking disruption
Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development has reportedly instructed the country’s major ISPs on how to detect and block VPN connections, warning of a few “significant limitations.”
As reported by local news outlet RBC on Sunday (April 5), the ministry, Maksut Shadaev, shared the instructions with more than 20 companies, including Yandex, VK and two local marketplaces (Wildberries and Ozon).
These platforms must restrict VPN users by April 15 or they could lose their IT accreditation.
Earlier this week, Shadaev shared a plan to “reduce VPN use” with new blocking obligations for businesses, along with new fines and fees for VPN users in the country. He then ordered all local mobile carriers to disable Apple ID payments, allegedly to make it more difficult to pay for a VPN subscription, starting April 1.
The first consequences of this latest wave of VPN restrictions are already showing. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, whose service is currently blocked in Russia, claimed that authorities’ attempts to block VPNs “triggered a massive bank failure,” in a post shared on X on Saturday.
As reported by the independent news outlet Meduza, data from the Russian outage tracking service Sboi.rf (Outage.ru) confirmed that the bank outage occurred on April 3, along with another wave of disruptions to several websites and apps associated with local banks, telecom operators, satellite companies and other Russian organizations.
How Russian companies are expected to detect VPNs
According to Shadaev’s guidelines, companies must follow a three-step process to determine whether a VPN connection is enabled on users’ devices.
- Identify the device’s IP addressesand then compare it with a list of known Russian IPs and blocked addresses.
- Check for use of VPN for access to the company’s own app on the users iOS and Android units.
- Check VPN use on devices running operating systems other than iOS and Android (Windows, macOS, Linux).
The document also notes that a whitelist will be created to exclude legitimate corporate VPNs and corporate proxy services from the block.
It also advises against continuous monitoring of VPN connections on users’ devices, warning that doing so would “adversely affect traffic usage and battery life,” RBC reported.
VPN detection limits and solutions
The authorities do not hide the fact that there are several challenges and limitations in VPN detection.
Specifically, the guidance warns that the execution of the second phase of the verification is harder on iPhones as “access to system parameters on iOS is significantly limited.”
Running a VPN on a router or i virtual machines also makes VPN detection more difficult, if not impossible.
To have split tunneling enabled can also help. It is a feature that allows users to select the apps or websites to be routed through the VPN tunnel. In this case, testing over a single active network will not be enough.
The authorities have also marked this new VPN services continues to be developed, which means that not all IP addresses associated with Virtual Private Network (VPN) services are known.
We recommend that citizens see these restrictions as the north star to follow to navigate the crack. Whenever possible, we suggest you install their VPN on a router or virtual machine, enable split tunneling, and connect to newly launched VPN servers.
Some VPN providers have been upping their censorship-resistant features lately, precisely to cope with the latest wave of restrictions in Iran and Russia. These include Russia-based Amnezia VPN (and its recently updated AmneziaWG protocol), Windscribe VPN, and NymVPN.
TechRadar reached out to these providers to find out if their apps are still working as normal and if there are other potential solutions. We will update the page as more information becomes available.
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