Russians are increasingly turning to Western news sources to learn accurate information about the situation in Ukraine.
See also: Russian hackers target NATO networks and European military forces
According to Cloudflare, statistics show that Internet users in Russia are adopting quite aggressive circumvention tools to gain access to British, American, and French news websites.
At the same time, the Russian government appears reluctant to isolate the country from the global Internet, as many have suggested was the plan, and also appears unable to increase blocking of access to resources due to quality issues.
However, Russia has blocked access to Western media and social media sites to control posts about its invasion of Ukraine.
As the war in Ukraine continues and Russian media fails to provide evidence or even convincing justification for the so-called special military operation, many Russians are trying to bypass the bloc to learn more from Western media.
See also: Russians use VPNs to bypass censorship
In March, Russia's most downloaded mobile apps were various VPN tools, Telegram, and Cloudflare's own "WARP/1.1.1.1," a privacy-focused recursive DNS resolver that can route user requests through one of the company's servers.
WARP protects DNS requests from being monitored by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), protects against DNS poisoning, and offers smart features like malware filtering.
Analyzing usage statistics from WARP, Cloudflare saw a surge in usage based in Russia starting in early March. Most of the DNS lookups coming from this market are for major French, British, and American newspapers.
Cloudflare also reports a spike in DDoS activity, peaking in the second week of March, originating from inside Russia.
See also: Russian hackers strike with ransomware attack using open-source tools
According to the blog post, these attacks targeted websites outside of Russia, but were mitigated at the source, which is easier and more effective.
A month ago, Cloudflare announced special data protection measures in response to the war, including “wiping” servers based in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in the event of a power outage or widespread internet outage.
