Censorship

Pierluigi Paganini July 22, 2019
Kazakhstan wants to intercept all HTTPS Internet traffic of its citizens

Bad news for citizens of Kazakhstan, the government is beginning to intercept all the encrypted traffic, and to do it, it is forcing them to install a certificate. The Kazakhstan government is beginning to intercept all the encrypted traffic and to do it is forcing users in the country to install a certificate. The Kazakhstan […]

Pierluigi Paganini March 13, 2019
Russia attempts to prevent Russian citizens from using ProtonMail

ProtonMail back after the Russian government has been attempting to prevent Russian citizens from sending messages to ProtonMail. ProtonMail is now running normally in Russia, the popular encrypted email service was blocked after students at a sports competition were using it to spread anti-regime propaganda. The Russian news aggregator service Habr reported that Russian telcos […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 10, 2018
Search Engines in Russia cannot link to banned VPN services and Internet proxy services

Russia strengthens online censorship by announcing fines for search engines that link to VPN serviced banned in the country. Russian Government has approved a new bill to punish search engines that are not aligned with Moscow and that allows its users to find VPN services, and anonymization tools that allow circumventing the censorship. According to the amendments to the Code […]

Pierluigi Paganini May 16, 2018
Anonymous defaced Russia govt website against Telegram ban

Anonymous collective hacked and defaced the subdomain of the Russia’s Federal Agency for International Cooperation (Rossotrudnichestvo) site to protest against the government censorship, with a specific reference to the ban on Telegram. Anonymous hacked the official website of Russia’s Federal Agency for International Cooperation (Rossotrudnichestvo), the cyber attack occurred on May 10th (Rossotrudnichestvo). The popular collective hacked […]

Pierluigi Paganini March 11, 2018
Governments rely on Sandvine network gear to deliver spyware and miners

According to Citizen Lab, some governments are using Sandvine network gear installed at internet service providers to deliver spyware and cryptocurrency miners. Researchers at human rights research group Citizen Lab have discovered that netizens in Turkey, Egypt and Syria who attempted to download legitimate Windows applications from official vendor websites (i.e. Avast Antivirus, CCleaner, Opera, and 7-Zip)  […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 02, 2018
Force 47 – The Vietnamese brigade tasked with fighting “wrongful views” spreading online

Force 47 is a brigade composed of 10,000 cyber warriors to fight online dissent in Vietnam, a new threat to freedom of speech in the country. Like many other Governments, also Vietnam is deploying a cyber army of 10000 cyber experts to fight online dissent in the country. The news was revealed by a top Vietnamese […]

Pierluigi Paganini December 23, 2017
Chinese authorities have sentenced a man to 5 years in prison for selling a VPN service without the authorization

The Chinese authorities have sentenced a man to five-and-a-half years in prison for selling a VPN service without the authorization. China continues to intensify the monitoring of the cyberspace applying, the authorities always fight any services that could be used to bypass its censorship system known as the Great Firewall. The Great Firewall project already blocked access to […]

Pierluigi Paganini November 14, 2017
Freedom of the Net report – Manipulating Social Media, hacking election and much more

Freedom of the Net report – Online manipulation played a crucial role in elections in at least 18 countries over the past year, including the United States. While cyber security experts still debate cyber attacks against 2016 Presidential Election, according to the independent watchdog Freedom House at least 18 countries had their elections hacked last year. The […]

Pierluigi Paganini September 27, 2017
China widely disrupted WhatsApp in the country, broadening online censorship

The popular instant messaging application WhatsApp has been widely blocked in mainland China by the Government broadening online censorship. Bad news for the Chinese users of the popular instant messaging app WhatsApp because the application has been widely blocked in mainland China by the Government. Users are not able to send text messages, photo and video sharing. It isn’t […]

Pierluigi Paganini July 30, 2017
Apple removed iOS VPN apps from Chinese App Store in compliance to censorship law

In compliance with Chinese Internet monitoring law, Apple has started removing all IOS VPN apps from it App Store in China. The company complies with a request from the Chinese Government that wants to strict censorship making it harder for netizens to bypass the Great Firewall system (aka Golden Shield project). The Golden Shield project […]