Anonymity service Tor has been blocked by the Russian government and impersonated by an unknown bad actor. Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media, known as Roskomnadzor, blocked the main Tor site last week, cutting off the service from about 300,000 active Tor users in the country. Roskomnadzor claimed the sharing of illegal content was the reason for the block. “This is equivalent to banning the internet because people share illegal content,” commented Avast Security Evangelist Luis Corrons. “We all agree that certain types of contents can be illegal – child pornography being a good example – and what authorities have to do is to enforce law and prosecute those violating it, not ban a tool that provides anonymity and is widely used by citizens in certain countries trying to protect themselves from authoritarian governments.”
