The use of anonymity apps is on the rise in Russia. The world has changed in many ways since the invasion of Ukraine. But how much has Russia changed, especially with communication technology?
In the week beginning February 28, Russian Internet users downloaded the top five VPN applications from Apple and Google’s App Store a total of 2.7 million times. Sensor Tower, a market research firm, reports that the number is almost three times higher than the previous week.
What is VPN?
The full form of VPN is Virtual Private Network.
VPN keeps a user’s identity secret while browsing the Internet. The Internet identifies a user or a website through its Internet Protocol or IP. VPN does this by keeping the IP address secret.
Example: Suppose for some reason it is decided that no person from Chittagong will enter the city of Los Angeles and in order to implement this, the registration number of all the vehicles of Houston is matched at the time of entering Los Angeles. Now if someone from Houston comes to Los Angeles in the car of someone from another district, he will not stop that car, as it is not the car of any person from Houston. This is exactly what VPN does.
If Facebook is banned in any country, then VPN sends the content of Facebook to the VPN organization in the form of data packet encrypted. Although Facebook is mentioned as an example, it can happen to any site.
CNN reports that the censor tower’s data matched the information provided by various VPN service providers. Switzerland-based Proton reports that the number of signups for their services from Russia has increased thousands of times this month. However, the company did not provide any numbers for comparison.
Since March 1, traffic on various messaging apps, including Meta Messenger and WhatsApp services, has been steadily increasing, according to Internet monitoring platform Cloudflare. This information is matched by data on increasing traffic on social media platforms around the world, such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Messaging App
However, the fastest growing messaging app in Russia is probably the messaging app Signal with encryption services. The censorship says the signal was downloaded 132,000 times in the country last week, up 28 percent from the previous week.
The popularity of other messaging apps, which support privacy in messaging services, has slowed down that week. An example is a telegram. However, the censor tower said that more than five lakh telegrams have been downloaded during that period.
Tor Network
In recent weeks, Russian Internet users have probably increased their reliance on Tor. Tor is a service that sends user traffic to Internet browsing privacy services by sending it through various servers around the world in various incomprehensible forms. Since the day of Ukraine’s aggression, Tor has expressed the idea that thousands of Russian users are using the Internet through secret servers connected to Tor’s decentralized network.
Russia has been partially banned Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. Since Thursday, Twitter has launched a special Torbandhab website for Russian users. And since 2014, Facebook has had its own Tor site.
Lantern
Another secret service called Lantern, reports that the number of their clients in Russia has been increasing since about two months ago. This service provides ‘peer-to-peer’ internet service, avoiding official firewalls.
In the last two months alone, Lantern’s customer base has grown by 2,000 percent, said Sascha Mainrath, a professor of communications at Penn State University. He is a board member of Brave New Software, the parent company of Lantern. Instead of an average of 5,000 downloads per month, the number of lantern downloads has now reached 120,000.
Meinrath says the popularity of services that allow you to hide, that is, who you are and who you visit, is growing dramatically in Russia. In addition, telegram users are telling each other which apps they should download.
In Russia, technology-conscious users are using different services simultaneously as needed. For example, Lantern to avoid official firewalls and Tor to browse anonymously – said Professor Mainrath.
Read More: How Ukraine-Russia Cyber War Could Impact the Global?
