ExpressVPN warns Russian users of 'unprecedented difficulties'

ExpressVPN users in Russia have noticed significant outages, up to and including the complete shutdown of this VPN in recent weeks.

Formally, Roskomnadzor announced the blocking of ExpressVPN along with five other services (Hola!VPN, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited, Nord VPN, Speedify VPN, IPVanish VPN) September 3, 2022.

But until recently, in practice, ExpressVPN worked with little or no interruptions. Only in February the situation changed radically. In particular, about the broken ExpressVPN on Twitter reported foreign correspondents working in Russia. Temporarily solved the problem VPN protocol change.

The solution turned out to be temporary, and did not work for all users. So far, the situation continues to deteriorate: according to users, ExpressVPN has stopped working on the mobile Internet of MTS, Megafon and Tele2, and the number of home Internet providers that block it is increasing every day.

All this is according to the information of individual users in social networks. There were no press releases or news about this, so I just contacted ExpressVPN support and asked what was going on. To their credit, they answered instantly. This post will be helpful to those who are now google what is happening with their VPN and ExpressVPN in particular.

According to ExpressVPN support, they know the situation. Verbatim:

The Russian government is currently actively blocking VPN connections. The difficulties caused by the latest lockdown measures have been unprecedented.

Actually, users of ExpressVPN and, most likely, other VPNs from the block list of Roskomnadzor faced these difficulties.

Recall that since 2017, VPN services are required, at the direction of Roskomnadzor, to connect to the Federal State Information System and restrict access to sites prohibited in Russia.

Can a VPN be blocked?

Unfortunately yes.

As writes Roskomsvobodathere are many ways to do this: from the banal blocking of the IP address of the servers where the VPN service accesses to update its databases for connection, to the blocking of protocols (IKEv2, OpenVPN, WireGuard).

To do this, TSPU are used – technical means of countering threats. This is a software and hardware complex that allows you to restrict access to information, the distribution of which is prohibited on the territory of Russia.

Each VPN protocol is unique in its own way and has an original “fingerprint”, with which you can find out what this protocol is. TSPU can look at these fingerprints and filter (limit) them as required, so you can block WireGuard (whose fingerprint is very easy to read) very quickly, however, like other well-known protocols.

The number of providers that have installed TSPU for themselves is growing, as recent difficulties show.

In addition, no one guarantees that Russia will not follow the path of the “sovereign Internet” with the complete closure of the Runet behind a firewall, following the example of China, or even turning the Internet into an intranet, like in the DPRK. In this case, any mass VPN will be helpless.

Solutions

In the current situation, the ExpressVPN support gave two pieces of advice:

Keep automatic selection of the connection protocol in the settings.
Try changing connection countries. Of the latest options that have worked at the time of this post, Singapore – Marine Bay and Italy have worked.

The current country options through which you can continue to bypass blocking can be requested in the support chat on the website expressvpn.comwhich, surprisingly, is not blocked.

What’s next?

An important factor in the fight against blocking is the position of the service and its willingness to fight for its users. For now, ExpressVPN provides support and stays in touch with its Russian users. But the question to what extent they are ready to fight Russian censorship and offer ways to get around the blocking before they shrug is still open.