Whoops: Russia’s Attempt To Block VPNs Causes Major Banking Failure

from the whoops-a-daisy dept

VPNs (when integrity is maintained and the owners aren’t sleazy scammers) have long been the mortal enemy of shitty, surveillance-happy governments.

And when shitty, surveillance-happy governments try to block or degrade the use of VPNs, bad things can happen. As Russia found out recently when a ham-fisted effort to block VPN users from accessing Telegram resulted in a massive outage for online banking across the entire country.

Last February Russia tried to delete WhatsApp and Telegram from its version of the internet in the hopes of driving Russians to Max, the country’s approved “everything app.” Max has no encryption or privacy protections, making it easier for Vladimir Putin’s government to engage in mass surveillance of the public’s online activities.

VPN use makes that harder. An estimated 50 million Russians still use VPNs to access Telegram, according to CEO Pavel Durov (happily posting away over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website):

So last May, Russia’s Digital Minister Maksut Shadayev announced an effort to “reduce VPN ​usage.” But Durov says those efforts have been a broad failure, recently resulting in a massive outage (Bloomberg paywalled, Gizmodo alternative) for all online banking apps in Russia:

“But amid its effort to weaken VPNs on Friday, according to Bloomberg, accounts from “The Bell and other Russian media” banking apps were disrupted. This disruption might have been, “caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia’s communications watchdog, according to the reports,” Bloomberg explained, “with experts warning that major restrictions risk undermining network stability.”

Something similar happened in 2018. Whoops. Apparently the Russian government was so eager to ban VPNs, they erroneously targeted IP addresses tied to banking infrastructure owned by Sberbank, VTB, and T-Bank, demonstrating the fragile nature of centralized financial infrastructure. The outage briefly made mobile payment apps unusable, making cash the only viable transaction option for part of a day.

Given that shitty autocratic governments (like our own) are incapable of learning anything useful from experience, you can expect the problem to repeat itself.

Filed Under: autocracy, banking, bans, freedom, outage, russia, spying, surveillance, vpns

Companies: telegram