The number of blocked sites increased by 85% in the first half of the year

Roskomnadzor summed up the results of the first half of the year on blocking sites that distribute information prohibited in the Russian Federation. During this period, year on year, 85% more resources and 10% more individual materials were blocked on the network. This momentum was driven by the widening grounds for blocking last year. The trend may be spurred on by the inclusion in the list of sites that disseminate data on methods for bypassing blocking. Experts doubt that as a result, users will completely lose access to VPN services, but the IT companies developing them are at risk of encountering difficulties.

In the first half of the year, at the request of Roskomnadzor, more than 885 thousand sites with information prohibited by law were blocked or deleted in Russia, which is 85% more than in the same period in 2022, Kommersant was told in the department. The number of blocked or deleted individual content online also increased to 1.1 million, up 10% from all of 2022.

Roskomnadzor maintains a register of blocked sites based on court decisions and bodies that have the right to demand pre-trial blocking – the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Federal Tax Service, Rosmolodezh, etc. The latter concerns sites and pages that disseminate information of an extremist nature, pornography, information about drugs, fraudulent sites, pirated content, as well as resources of persons recognized by the Ministry of Justice as foreign agents.

In 2022, new grounds for blocking appeared: for the dissemination of false or defamatory information about the Russian army. At the same time, Roskomnadzor also conducts out-of-registry blocking using technical means to counter threats installed by operators under the law on the “sovereign Internet” – for example, connections to popular public VPNs and to nodes of the Tor network are blocked.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation told Kommersant that back in 2022 they launched their own program to combat fraudulent resources: “Over 90,000 such sites have been blocked over the entire period of operation of the anti-phishing system, specialists are constantly monitoring the Internet.”

“We used to be able to track both mass blocking and mass deregistration, but now the situation has changed, as there are more grounds for blocking,” says Inna Tverezovskaya, head of the DRC’s freedom of information and reputation practice. “It has become much more difficult to find out the very reason for blocking “.

Thus, the lawyer adds, “the funnel of getting into the registry is only increasing, but the “neck” of the exit is narrowing.” According to Ms. Tverezovskaya, many resources with foreign IP addresses are blocked, and at the same time, ways to bypass the blocking are limited.

Roskomnadzor received the right to selectively block programs that allow users to access sites prohibited in the country bypassing blocking (VPN services) several years ago. In early September, the Ministry of Digital Transformation published a draft resolution, according to which the department as a whole will be able to block sites with information on how to bypass blocking (see Kommersant of September 3).

However, IT market participants doubt that blocking can lead to the complete closure of VPN services for both users and businesses. “The development of VPN devices, such as crypto gateways, will continue. But small teams and IT startups working in this direction will finally leave the Russian market and, most likely, will be dissolved in foreign companies,” says Dmitry Ovchinnikov, chief specialist of the department of integrated information security systems at Gazinformservice.

In the short term, cybersecurity will not suffer from this, but in the long term, the IT community “may suffer significant losses, including because companies choose to develop abroad,” emphasizes Mr. Ovchinnikov. Thus, Kaspersky Lab announced last fall that it would disable the Kaspersky Secure Connection VPN application for Russians by the end of the year (it gave access to more than 2,000 servers in 30 countries), while users outside the country would still have access.

Tatiana Isakova, Yuri Litvinenko