This means the impact on citizen digital rights is even greater, disproportionately affecting people's well-being, the right to privacy, free speech and access to online resources and information. The governments cracking down the most on the use of privacy-first and censorship-evading tools are, not surprisingly, the nations enforcing a stricter grip on the open internet-both in terms of online surveillance and censorship levels. Unfortunately, it’s often in countries where these tools are most needed that their access is restricted," Woodhams told TechRadar. "The blocking of VPN websites and other privacy preserving technologies serves as an important reminder of the many ways governments attempt to control their populations online. What's at stake for user digital freedoms? Woodhams said that the team at Top10VPN will continue to document how frequently these websites are blocked to track whether Russia and other countries step up their censorship efforts over the coming months. Other popular services heavily blocked include, Hola VPN, TunnelBear, Hotspot Shield, Nord VPN, Surfshark, Mullvad, Proton VPN, Lantern and more. That's probably due to its high level of security as well as popularity.
In terms of the most blocked services, the Tor browser appears to be the enemy #1 consistently across all the 10 countries restricting circumventing tools. IP-based blocking looks to be a less common tactic than once was, the researchers noted. Again, this is a broad term including censorship methods like deep packet inspections (DPI) and TLS disruptions that allow censors to monitor and block connections. This describes various tactics to interfere connections on the DNS level like blocking certain IPs, configuring it to provide error responses to some queries and more.Īnother widespread tactic was HTTP/HTTPS interference. The biggest offenders (China and Iran) mainly turned to DNS tampering. (Image credit: Top10VPN)Īs the chart above shows, countries employed a wide range of tactics to prevent citizens from accessing the official websites of the most popular circumvention tools. "Access to VPN and other tools is still restricted three times more than the global average but it’s a long way off from where China and Iran are," said Woodhams.įailure refers to instances where the Open Observatory for Network Interference (OONI) was unable to automatically determine the cause of interference. In April, the government even launched a new disinformation campaign to dissuade citizens using these tools. The Kremlin has been in a long battle against the use of VPNs in Russia. Given the recent rise of anti-VPN rhetoric and the increasing criminalization of their use, we had expected that the rates of blocking would have been higher." Talking about the findings, Samuel Woodhams, digital rights researcher at Top10VPN, told TechRadar, "The blocking of VPN websites in Russia really stood out to us. The other countries in the top 10 for VPN censorship are, Yemen (62%), Saudi Arabia (60%), Oman (49%), United Arab Emirates (44%), Egypt (39%), Qatar (38%), Russia (32%), and Uzbekistan (32%). Considering that the global average is only 8%, that's a pretty staggering amount. > Majority of worst offenders are MENA nations but Tunisia is among the countries blocking VPNs the least (1%)Īs mentioned before, China VPNs and Iran VPNs were the services blocked the most-73% and 69% of attempts, respectively. > The UK, US and Hong Kong censored 4% of connection attempts to VPNs
China blocked VPN websites over eight times (812%) more than the global average of 8%
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