The Russian Censorship Circumvention, Tom’s Traps, and Jerry’s VPN: A 5-Year Journey

<p>This presentation traces a five-year cat-and-mouse chase between a small VPN provider — more than 150 servers worldwide, millions of users, available on all major platforms — and the Russian state censorship machine. A real-world “Tom and Jerry” scenario where survival hinges on constant adaptation.</p> <p>I’ll walk through the evolving technical and non-technical tactics used by Russian authorities to block VPN access for ordinary users. Every story comes from real, first-hand experience. The methods used five years ago and the methods used today are on entirely different levels; Tom keeps learning new tricks, and Jerry’s struggle to stay alive only gets harder.</p> <p>This talk aims to be useful and insightful for network security engineers, business decision-makers, and human rights activists. Russia is not the only dictatorship experimenting with these techniques — and we expect more dictators to learn from the Russian playbook and adopt similar methods.</p>