It is a known fact that Russian authorities are strict about websites and their operations. Now, a new report has surfaced which claims that Russian authorities have sent out an order to major VPN providers in the country. This order states that the VPN providers need to block “banned” sites.
It essentially means that Russia does not want people to access sites banned by them even through VPN. These orders have been handed out to major VPNs such as NordVPN, ExpressVPN, IPVanish, and HideMyAss. Apart from that, TorGuard is said to have shut operations in the country due to this notification.
As we all know, Russia, North Korea, and China are among those countries who have blocked various sites. The reason being that they are not happy with its working. Now, we understand that banning sites which promote extremist content is not good at all. But Russia has also previously banned sites which have pirated content.
This time around, all these sites have been affected. Now, we know that people have found workarounds in the form of a VPN. VPNs or Virtual Private Networks are networks which do not reveal your information such as location, IP address, etc. This means that even if you are accessing a site banned in Russia from Russia, no one can find that out.
Since the VPNs will now block the websites, there is no likely workaround to this. By law, local ISPs are now required to block these websites. If the sites continue to be accessed by VPNs and if any VPN is found to not block the website, they can be added to Russia’s ‘Internet blacklist’ or FGIS.
This is a list maintained by the Russian government which lists all the sites banned in the country. Now that the orders for blocking banned websites to VPNs are given, we see most of the VPNs leaving Russia very soon.