Finding one that is both affordable and secure can be a challenge.Īnd not everyone knows where to look or even what a VPN is.
Grant Baker, a researcher focusing on technology and democracy in Europe and Eurasia at the pro-democracy nonprofit Freedom House, said that when mass censorship occurs, there are upticks in VPN use, but it’s hard to know which ones are secure - and many aren’t. “The refusal of Visa and Mastercard payment systems to work with Russian citizens leads to the fact that Russians cannot pay for access to high-quality VPN services,” Klimarev said.įree VPNs will sometimes sell user data and may provide less privacy and security than ones people paid for, meaning people’s online behavior may not be as protected from the Russian government. “They were simply better positioned for organic discovery versus big brands,” he added.īut sanctions and withdrawals by major multinational firms may also have steered Russians to marginal or unproven services. Brandless apps were heavily downloaded in the earliest days of the surge in demand, Michaeli said. “It was a sudden and very abrupt change in demand.” But it’s not clear that the VPNs many Russians flocked to are reputable. “I do see VPNs as coming to the rescue in Russia right now for all the obvious reasons,” said Michaeli. Putin’s government has now blocked more than 300 major websites, according to Top10VPN. Netflix in Nigeria can also be used to access sites banned in Russia.Īriel Michaeli, founder and CEO of app analytics company AppFigures, said there were a total of 10 million downloads of 121 different VPN apps in Russia over the last 30 days. The same tool that lets someone watch U.S. In practice, that means a VPN user’s connection is shown as coming from a proxy server, often one located in an entirely different country. VPNs do so by creating the equivalent of an encrypted tunnel for a user’s internet connection that hides their IP address and those of the sites they visit. Russians have long used VPNs, or virtual private networks, which can be used to mask a computer’s IP address by bouncing it between different countries. By contrast, China’s internet developed with tight limits in place, and the country has spawned services like the search engine Baidu and social media app Weibo to meet demand.
The Russian government’s aggressive push to isolate Russia from the wider internet has raised concerns that Putin is attempting to create his own version of China’s “Great Firewall.” But experts told Grid that will be difficult to impose on a country that has had relatively unfettered access to this point, and one that has few homegrown services to fill the gaps left by blocked sites. On the other hand, Western companies are limiting the already declining internet connectivity.” “On the one hand, dictator Putin and his minions are trying to restrict access to truthful information.
“Russian users are now between two fires,” said Mikhail Klimarev, the executive director of the Internet Protection Society, a nonprofit organization that aims to protect free internet access in Russia. By Monday, demand for VPN services had reached 2,088 percent of the average daily demand in the week before Russia invaded Ukraine, according to an analysis by privacy monitoring service Top10VPN. Over the past couple of weeks, the Russian government has blocked popular services like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, along with foreign news sites.
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