VPN use skyrockets in Iran as citizens navigate internet censorship under Tehran’s crackdown
Iranians protest to demand justice and highlight the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by morality police and subsequently died in hospital in Tehran under suspicious circumstances.
Mike Kemp | In Pictures via Getty Images
Iranians are turning to virtual private networks to bypass widespread internet disruptions as the government tries to conceal its crackdown on mass protests.
Outages first started hitting Iran’s telecommunications networks on Sept 19., according to data from internet monitoring companies Cloudflare and NetBlocks, and have been ongoing for the last two and a half weeks.
Internet monitoring groups and digital rights activists say they’re seeing “curfew-style” network disruptions every day, with access being throttled from around 4 p.m. local time until well into the night.
Tehran blocked access to WhatsApp and Instagram, two of the last remaining uncensored social media services in Iran. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and several other platforms have been banned for years.
As a result, Iranians have flocked to VPNs, services that encrypt and reroute their traffic to a remote server elsewhere in the world to conceal their online activity. This has allowed them to restore connections to restricted websites and apps.
On Sept. 22, a day after WhatsApp and Instagram were banned, demand for VPN services skyrocketed 2,164% compared to the 28 days prior, according to figures from Top10VPN, a VPN reviews and research site.
By Sept. 26, demand peaked at 3,082% above average, and it has continued to remain high since, at 1,991% above normal levels, Top10VPN said.
“Social media plays a crucial role in protests all around the world,” Simon Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN, told CNBC. “It allows protesters to organize and ensure the authorities can’t control the narrative and suppress evidence of human rights abuses.”
“The Iranian authorities’ decision to block access to these platforms as the protests erupted has caused demand for VPNs to skyrocket,” he added.
Demand is much higher than during the uprisings of 2019, which were triggered by rising fuel prices and led to a near-total internet blackout for 12 days. Back then, peak demand was only around 164% higher than usual, according to Migliano.
Nationwide protests over Iran’s strict Islamic dress code began on Sept. 16 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman. Amini died under suspicious circumstances after being detained — and allegedly struck — by Iran’s so-called “morality police” for wearing her hijab too loosely. Iranian authorities denied any wrongdoing and claimed Amini died of a heart attack.
At least 154 people have been killed in the protests, including children, according to the nongovernmental group Iran Human Rights. The government has reported 41 deaths. Tehran has sought to prevent the sharing of images of its crackdown and hamper communication aimed at organizing further demonstrations.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
Why VPNs are popular in Iran
VPNs are a common way for people under regimes with strict internet controls to access blocked services. In China, for instance, they’re often used as a workaround to restrictions on Western platforms blocked by Beijing, including Google, Facebook and Twitter. Homegrown platforms like Tencent’s WeChat are extremely limited in terms of what can be said by users.
Russia saw a similar rise in demand for VPNs in March after Moscow tightened internet curbs following the invasion of Ukraine.
Swiss startup Proton said it saw daily signups to its VPN service balloon as much as 5,000% at the peak of the Iran protests compared to average levels. Proton is best known as the creator of ProtonMail, a popular privacy-focused email service.
“Since the killing of Mahsa Amini, we have seen a huge uptick in demand for Proton VPN,” Proton CEO and founder Andy Yen told CNBC. “Even prior to that, though, VPN usage is high in Iran due to censorship and fears of surveillance.”
“Historically, we have seen internet crackdowns during periods of unrest in Iran which lead to a rise in VPN usage.”
The most popular VPN services during the protests in Iran have been Lantern, Mullvad and Psiphon, according to Top10VPN, with ExpressVPN also seeing big increases. Some VPNs are free to use, while others require a monthly subscription.
Not a silver bullet
The use of VPNs in tightly restricted countries like Iran hasn’t been without its challenges.
“It is fairly easy for regimes to block the IP addresses of the VPN servers as they can be found quite easily,” said Deryck Mitchelson, field chief information security officer for the EMEA region at Check Point Software.
“For that reason you will find that open VPNs are only available for a short duration before they are identified and blocked.”
Periodic internet outages in Iran have “continued daily in a curfew-style rolling manner,” said NetBlocks, in a blog post. The disruption “affects connectivity at the network layer,” NetBlocks said, meaning they’re not easily solved through the use of VPNs.
Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher at free speech campaign group Article 19, said a contact she’s been communicating with in Iran showed his network failing to connect to Google, despite having installed a VPN.
“This is new refined deep packet inspection technology that they’ve developed to make the network extremely unreliable,” she said. Such technology allows internet service providers and governments to monitor and block data on a network.
Authorities are being much more aggressive in seeking to thwart new VPN connections, she added.
Yen said Proton has “anti-censorship technologies” built into its VPN software to “ensure connectivity even under challenging network conditions.”
VPNs aren’t the only techniques citizens can use to circumvent internet censorship. Volunteers are setting up so-called Snowflake proxy servers, or “proxies,” on their browsers to allow Iranians access to Tor — software that routes traffic through a “relay” network around the world to obfuscate their activity.
“As well as VPNs, Iranians have also been downloading Tor in significantly greater numbers than usual,” said Yen.
Meanwhile, encrypted messaging app Signal compiled a guide on how Iranians can use proxies to bypass censorship and access the Signal app, which was blocked in Iran last year. Proxies serve a similar purpose as Tor, tunneling traffic through a community of computers to help users in countries where online access is restricted preserve anonymity.
Technology
Amazon was questioned by House China committee over ‘dangerous and unwise’ TikTok partnership
Amazon logo on a brick building exterior, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Amazon representatives met with the House China committee in recent months to discuss lawmaker concerns over the company’s partnership with TikTok, CNBC confirmed.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered on a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to link their account with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The Select Committee conveyed to Amazon that it is dangerous and unwise for Amazon to partner with TikTok given the grave national security threat the app poses,” the spokesperson said. The parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
Representatives from Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s future viability in the U.S. is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services would be prohibited from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could rescue TikTok from a potential U.S. ban. He promised on the campaign trail that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the app.
In his first administration, Trump had tried to implement a TikTok ban. He changed his stance around the time he met with billionaire Jeff Yass. The Republican megadonor’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass has a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
Technology
Amazon launches fixed pricing for treatment of conditions such as hair loss. Hims & Hers stock drops 15%
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports7 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Environment1 year agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway