Compass Investments

– Russia is tightening its control over cryptoassets through Deep Packet Analysis (DPI) technology. According to a study by Outset PR, Internet operators supervised by Roskomnadzor are engaging in selective censorship.

In recent days, the digital information field in Russia has been feeling the effects of what appears to be a systematic, albeit unspoken, campaign of technological suppression. Roskomnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, seems to have stepped up surveillance and suppression of access to resources dedicated to cryptocurrencies and digital finance. {

All over the country, a lot of users record sudden interruptions in access to various specialized publications, and all this without any formal explanations from the authorities. To clarify the situation, Outset PR’s team of analysts conducted a series of network diagnostics to determine whether these outages follow a certain algorithm.

The tests revealed a clear pattern: many web resources were inaccessible when accessed from Russian home Wi-Fi networks. At the same time, the same portals were loaded via other types of connections or by using tools for circumvention without any problems. This completely rejects the version about technical problems on the servers or their shutdown, directly pointing to interference at the network level.

The sample includes major international media outlets such as Benzinga, Coinness, FastBull, FXEmpire, CoinGeek, Cryptonoticias, Cointelegraph, CoinEdition, The Coin Republic, AMBCrypto and Nada News. Experts estimate that such restrictions could already affect about a quarter of all publications in the financial and crypto space.

The technical basis for this new wave of restrictions is Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). Unlike simple DNS redirection, DPI gives Internet Service Providers (ISPs) the ability to inspect traffic and selectively stop it.

During technical tests, activation of DPI bypass tools immediately restored access to previously closed resources. This is “irrefutable proof” that the restrictions are not caused by technical failures, but by active and targeted filtering applied by Russian operators based on (also undisclosed) information from government agencies.

Despite the general trend, the application of blocking does not appear to be centralized or homogeneous. A test conducted among 10 users in different regions of the Russian Federation showed discrepancies: while the majority were unable to access selected sites without a VPN, two participants reported minimal or no problems at all.

This suggests a decentralized enforcement model: restrictions are announced by the authorities, and individual providers enforce them using their own technical solutions and following different schedules. However, where blocking is in place, the response is identical – a systematic “connection interruption” error occurs.

The most alarming aspect of this situation is the absence of these domains in the official state register of blocked sites of Roskomnadzor. As a rule, the blocked resource gets into the open blacklist. In this case, however, the restrictions seem to operate in a legal vacuum.

Roskomnadzor itself has previously admitted that not all access restriction measures require public notification. This approach allows censorship measures to be more fluid and less visible to international scrutiny while Russia formally reforms crypto regulation, paradoxically relaxing some bans on private transactions.

To summarize, the data collected paints a picture of extensive and technically sophisticated controls, in which access to independent financial information is discreetly filtered, leaving investors in Russia in a state of information insecurity.