Adding an address to the “white list” – $ 1-2 thousand per month
The Cybersecurity Service of Turkmenistan has blocked half of the Internet in the country and feeds on IP racketeering
The original of this material
© turkmen.news02/21/2023, The Cybersecurity Service of Turkmenistan has turned Internet access into a profitable business
More than half of the world’s IP addresses have already been blocked in Turkmenistan. However, the Cybersecurity Service continues to disable more and more new subnets. Sources of turkmen.news report that this is done, in particular, for the purpose of making money: such a service as adding IP to the “white list” sells well.
A subnet is a range of IPs that start with the same digits. In the last couple of years, allegedly “harmful” sites have not been targeted in Turkmenistan, but the entire subnet has been closed if, for example, a working VPN is found in it.
According to sources, if the site of a Turkmen organization is among those blocked, it is possible to “solve the issue” for 1-2 thousand dollars a month. For this amount, the site will remain available.
Moreover, you can also whitelist the IP on which the VPN is running. This means that this VPN continues to work, and its owner’s clients can freely visit prohibited sites. In other words, for money, the special services are ready to provide citizens with the opportunity to visit even those very opposition resources, for the sake of combating which unprecedentedly tough blockages were introduced.
Observers conclude that corruption schemes have become almost the main goal of the Cybersecurity Service. It can be calculated that the income of the compilers of the “white lists” is estimated at tens of thousands of dollars every month. What other goals could there be? IN secret state program on ensuring the cybersecurity of Turkmenistan, which was at the disposal of turkmen.news in 2022, much is said about certain “cyber threats”, but it does not specify what kind of dangers they are talking about. But whatever that means, it’s hard to imagine that most of the sites on the Internet turned out to be “dangerous”.
As of December 2022, there were locked more than 2.5 billion IPs, while there are about 4 billion of them in the world. In other words, already most of the Internet is not available in the country. And you can go to those sites that are still open only at speeds up to 2 mb / s (in other countries of the world, speeds of 100 or more mb / s are now considered normal).
In recent months, the authorities do not even hide that they are moving towards the creation of an autonomous National Digital Network. Today such a network exists in North Korea.
Only people who understand little about the work of the Internet are going to create this network. Observers note that the Turkmen security services see something mechanical in the global network. It seems to them that if you block, for example, YouTube, then it will disappear. But this is not so: after all, the YouTube servers remain untouched, and Turkmen users can only search and find! – ways to bypass blocking. It is impossible to completely separate a modern person from all information that is undesirable for the authorities.
At the same time, as you can see, the process of blocking is influenced by perhaps the most important factor in Turkmen politics – corruption. In fact, the “national network” is turning into the “Internet for the rich”: information is not only inaccessible, but it costs significantly more than in any other country in the world.
Internet is locked
How the authorities isolated Turkmenistan from the outside virtual world
The original of this material
© turkmen.news, 08/25/2022, Long-term shutdown. It is almost impossible to use the Internet in Turkmenistan
The blocking of websites in Turkmenistan has become almost impossible to overcome. According to turkmen.news sources, the country has now come close to the situation that was observed throughout the world in the 1990s: the Internet is turning into a subculture accessible only to IT professionals. Several tens of millions of IPs are under blocking.
In past years, almost anyone could cope with blocking, at least a little versed in modern technologies. You just had to download any VPN application, turn it on and go to blocked sites. This is how millions of people now live in Russia, where in the spring of 2022 the company Meta, which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, was recognized as extremist. Despite the blocking, any Russian housewife can go to Instagram. This was the case in Turkmenistan until recently.
But recently, the State Cyber Security Service, located in the Sanly ulgam building on Yunus Emre Street in Ashgabat, has been actively blocking IP addresses running VPNs. If earlier only the address on which the VPN was found was closed, now addresses are turned off by entire subnets up to the degree / 16 – that is, groups of 65536 pieces.
Hundreds of hosting providers were blocked in the vds.menu, vps.today directories, as well as subnets 3.0.0.0/8, 45.0.0.0/8, 185.0.0.0/8, each of which contains more than 16.7 million IPs. To understand the scale of the catastrophe, here is an (incomplete!) list of so-called autonomous systems that fell under the blocking. Together they own over 60 million IP addresses.
https://db-ip.com/as54113 – Fastly company range, 537552 IP addresses.
https://db-ip.com/as24940 – Hetzner Online range, 2296832 IP.
https://db-ip.com/as16509 – Amazon.com company range, 43213312 IP.
https://db-ip.com/as63949 – Linode range, 685568 IP.
https://db-ip.com/as202053 – UpCloud company range, 54784 IP.
https://db-ip.com/as50340 – Selectel range, 128528 IP.
https://db-ip.com/as12876 – ONLINE SAS company range, 544768 IP.
https://db-ip.com/as197695 – REG.RU range, 91904 IP.
https://db-ip.com/as16276 – OVH SAS range, 4125696 IP.
https://db-ip.com/as13335 is Cloudflare’s IP range, 2420992.
https://db-ip.com/as16625 – Akamai Technologies range, 7399168 IP.
These are leading hosting providers, domain name registrars, as well as companies that provide CDN (distributed network infrastructure) to the largest sites in the world, for the normal operation of which it is important that each user is automatically transferred to the server that is closer to him geographically.
In other words, the State Cyber Security Service effectively banned citizens of Turkmenistan from accessing half of the Internet. But it achieved its goal: almost all VPN programs that can be downloaded from Google Play or the App Store are now useless in Turkmenistan. Only a few applications continue to work … If you can call “work” the ability to occasionally connect to the Internet for a couple of hours at night.
Those who want something more have to rent servers in other countries on their own and install VPNs on them. This is not available to everyone. But even this does not save the situation: such VPNs also get blocked sooner or later.
“One VPN stops tens of thousands of pages from working! – emphasizes one of the sources. “At the same time, the problem of the Turkmen Internet is that blocked pages are almost never removed from the “black list”. Sometimes there are exceptions, some site is returned to users manually, but usually, if the IP is closed, then this is forever.
At the same time, according to sources, employees of the State Cyber Security Service are cashing in on the current situation, offering to whitelist the IP address for $ 1,000-1,500 per month.
If blocking is beneficial for the family budget of these employees, then it is exactly the opposite for the state. In July, Top10VPN estimated that in the first half of 2022, Turkmenistan lost due to blocking 29 million dollars. But turkmen.news sources believe that this figure is greatly underestimated.
“In the modern world, everything is based on the Internet,” explains the IT specialist. “Entire sectors of the economy are suffering: both private enterprises and government departments cannot work normally. Ordinary people cannot normally communicate with each other in instant messengers. It’s almost impossible to even text, and you can’t even dream of audio calls or video calls. It’s hard to estimate the damage from all this.”
So, today at least several tens of millions of IP addresses are blocked in Turkmenistan. This was done as part of the fight against VPN, but all legitimate resources suffer from this. In fact, a complete shutdown has been going on for several years, similar to those that took place in a much milder form in Kazakhstan, Belarus and other countries. Shutdowns in Belarus and Kazakhstan lasted several days and are considered historical events. In Turkmenistan, the authorities year after year continue to pretend that this is how the normal operation of the Internet looks like.