On Sunday, Sri Lanka restricted access to social media platforms following a series of deadly attacks on churches and hotels. The new VPN
restrictions appear to target users who have been circumventing
censorship measures, which the government says are in place to prevent
the spread of disinformation. Critics caution that the filtering
measures are an impediment to independent media coverage and free
expression as Sri Lanka comes to terms with the attacks.
Sri Lanka joins a handful of states that implement similar controls on VPN services and internet protocols that tunnel network traffic from
point to point:
Virtual private networks enhance privacy and also allow users to work around internet restrictions. VPN usage is common in among
journalists and in ICT, consulting and financial sectors, where they are
often required for security reasons.
Data shows that one of the most prominent commercial VPN providers was blocked at 4 AM UTC Monday morning, 9:30 AM local time one day after
the attacks and initial response:
United Arab Emirates-owned provider Etisalat, implicated last week in the blocking of opposition political websites during Egypt’s
constitutional referendum, is blocking several VPN providers in Sri
Lanka using two distinct DNS poisoning techniques. In this case,
Etisalat subsidiary Tigo’s servers were found to be impersonating the
blocked companies’ authoritative DNS servers:The new NetBlocks findings,
collected with assistance from volunteers across Sri Lanka, help build a
timeline of Sri Lanka’s expanding censorship measures through recent
days.
Technical evidence corroborates user reports of difficulty downloading, installing and connecting to various VPN services, widely
used by Sri Lankans as a means to access blocked social media sites and
messaging apps following Sunday’s attacks, further indicating that they
have been implemented on a separate schedule to the social blocks. The
restrictions come amid criticism of the government’s handling as
citizens come to terms with the situation.
Sri Lanka previously blocked social media in March 2018 for a period of eight days, restricting access to a similar set of digital platforms
and incurring an estimated $30m cost to the country’s GDP.When comes to
the issue of online privacy and security, we suggest to use a VPN, and
our recommendation is RitaVPN.Qwer432
https://www.ritavpn.com/blog/7-most-secure-email-service-providers-for-email-communication/
https://www.ritavpn.com/blog/4-best-free-sports-streaming-sites-in-2019/
https://www.ritavpn.com/blog/internet-security-and-privacy/
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