Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecommunications watchdog, blocked last week, on Thursday, May 3, 2018, access to over 50 VPN and proxy services.
Officials did not publish a list of the banned services, according to Russian news agency
TASS, who first reported the ban.
VPN and Proxy ban related to Telegram spat
Russian authorities banned the VPN and proxy services after users were utilizing these tools to skirt a nation-wide ban on Telegram, an instant messaging service banned in the country.
Russia banned Telegram on April 13 after the IM service
declined to provide access to customer encryption keys to Russian intelligence agency FSB so investigators could decrypt encrypted conversations during investigations.
The Telegram ban did not go as planned. Authorities initially banned Telegram's known IP addresses, but the service switched to new IPs.
In a controversial move, Roskomnadzor then
banned nearly 20 million IP addresses belonging to Amazon and Google Cloud, in an attempt to prevent Telegram from switching IPs and shift its infrastructure again.
After almost twelve days, during which hundreds of unrelated services suffered outages in Russia,
Roskomnadzor abandoned the Amazon and Google Cloud ban.
But many suspect that both Amazon and Google caved to the Russian telecommunications' watchdog pressure because three days later, both companies had
dropped support for a technique called "domain fronting," a system that Telegram and many other encrypted IM clients were using to go around state-level censorship attempts.
