At the beginning of summer, one of the most popular tools for bypassing internet restrictions faced unprecedented pressure. For a month and a half, attacks targeted not only the servers but also the supporting infrastructure, including payment systems and employee emails. According to the project's creators, preparation for this operation by regulatory authorities had been underway for about a year. One of the project's leading technical specialists shared details of this ongoing confrontation.
Evolution of Filtering Technologies and New Censorship Methods
The systematic campaign against censorship circumvention tools began several years ago, supported by state funding of over 1.3 billion rubles allocated to modernize blocking equipment. The service creators realized the severity of the threat a year ago when their version 1.0 protocol was blocked for the first time. This indicated that the regulator had established a specialized unit for the deep analysis of specific software. By summer, a new protocol version was ready, but censors managed to develop several countermeasures. They act sequentially: allowing the service to recover after the first hit, and then deploying the next countermeasure, draining the developers' resources.
High-performance modern equipment manufactured in China or assembled locally using foreign microchips is used to analyze traffic. Specialized software plays a crucial role here. The regulator has started to act much faster, quickly closing vulnerabilities. In the first half of June alone, the creators had to release four updates, after which the censors prepared new restrictions. The current version of the application using the third-generation protocol is currently successfully overcoming the barriers.
Changing Censor Tactics and Data Protection
The current campaign differs from previous years due to its high precision and comprehensive approach. Previously, regulatory authorities simply blocked protocols by their signatures, and restoring access only required a simple app update. Now, the tactics have changed: censors monitor user activity, identify IP addresses, and selectively block servers along with entire subnets. Because of this, developers must constantly change their server infrastructure, while delays in publishing updates in app stores complicate timely bypass of restrictions. Other services, including gaming platforms whose traffic mimics regular connections, have also run into difficulties.
Despite heavy pressure, small private servers used individually remain hard to reach for automated filtering systems. Download and activity metrics confirm that millions of people continue to configure their own secure nodes — for instance, the application was installed over 15 million times on Windows. Attacks on the project's website and payment gateways were accompanied by peak loads of up to 500,000 requests per second and average loads of about 100,000, as well as targeted phishing emails sent to employees. Nevertheless, the service's architecture is designed in such a way that even if the user database is compromised, third parties cannot decrypt the passing internet traffic.
Emergence of Shadow and Controlled Alternatives
Recently, initiatives to create government-controlled censorship circumvention networks have been actively discussed. On one hand, these could be corporate solutions for developers and public servants, granting access to a limited number of foreign resources under full monitoring. On the other hand, so-called privileged commercial services are beginning to appear on the market. Such projects can operate uninterrupted through local hosting providers due to unofficial agreements with the regulator.
Such approved services gain a significant financial advantage since they do not need to spend resources on developing innovative circumvention protocols. However, for users, this means a loss of privacy, and for the services themselves, a risk of instant shutdown at any moment. Developers of independent systems note that regulatory authorities have automated the subscription purchase process to quickly detect and analyze new server configurations, making this confrontation a constant process of adaptation.
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