Russian authorities have carried out a large-scale block of VPN services, according to the Telegram channel Exploit and Mikhail Klimarev, director of the Internet Protection Society. Klimarev said that authorities, with the help of IT companies, identified several dozen autonomous systems "where VPNs cluster" and blocked all prefixes associated with them. The restrictions affected IP addresses of more than 20 major hosting providers.
At least six projects publicly reported technical difficulties — VPN Legend, GaMMa VPN, LTVPN, ABS and FoxyBot, as well as VPN Generator. Paper VPN published a message about problems on August 4; users in comments confirmed the service is working intermittently, with some helped by changing location. Amnezia said the new wave of attacks did not affect it, although the service had previously faced blocks.
Cyber lawyer Sarkis Darbinyan told Agentstvo that the authorities' increased activity came after modules tracking VPNs on devices were integrated into Russian services in the spring. In addition, he said, Roskomnadzor began purchasing premium accounts in VPN services, allowing it to track their servers.
Leonid Volkov, head of political projects at FBK, called the current attack "the largest in history" and linked it to the autumn elections. According to his version, Russian applications (banks, marketplaces) recorded IP addresses of users who disabled VPNs to access them, allowing Roskomnadzor to build a database of addresses of services circumventing blocks. Volkov noted that services will be able to launch new addresses, but the attack could repeat.
Earlier, RBC sources reported that the Ministry of Digital Development wants to tighten control over IP addresses of corporate VPNs, which are allowed in Russia. The ministry plans to create a mechanism for continuous monitoring with hosting providers to exclude "disguised" services for circumventing blocks from the list. Whether the new wave of blocks is related to these discussions is not yet known.
Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have blocked hundreds of websites; since 2025, mass mobile internet outages and messenger blocks have begun. In total, according to official data, more than 400 VPN services have been blocked, and by 2030 Roskomnadzor has set the task of blocking 92% of tools for circumventing blocks.