CERT-IN — ✅ خرید وی پی ان ❇ ip ثایت vPn آی پی اختصاصی ◐

جولای 31, 2022

NordVPN, Express VPN, SurfShark shuts down India servers:

VPN services such as ExpressVPN, NordVPN and SurfShark have announced shutting down India servers. This comes in the aftermath of the recent cybersecurity rules introduced by the country’s cyber security agency CERT-In. The guidelines require VPN providers to store user data for a period of five years.
VPN services are essentially used to maintain a layer of privacy. Many resort to virtual proxy networks that allow users to stay free of website trackers that can keep track of data like a user’s location. However, it seems that VPN services and providers are not in line with India’s stand against proxy services. Here’s we explain what happened so far.
New VPN directives announced
On April 26, CERT-In, a wing of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued directives requiring VPN service providers to maintain details such as validated names of customers, the period for which they hired the service, the IP addresses allotted to them, their email addresses, time stamps, etc. This information has to be stored by VPN providers for five years or longer, as per the new guidelines.

While the government said that these details will help fight cybercrime. On the other hand, privacy is the main selling point of VPN services.
According to the directives, failing to meet the Ministry of Electronics and IT’s demands could lead to imprisonment of up to a year. Notably, companies are also required to keep track of and maintain user records even after a user has cancelled his/her subscription to the service. The new laws are expected to come into action within 60 days of being issued, which means they could kick in from July 27, 2022.
Backlash
As soon as the directives were pushed out, several policy experts raised concerns about the guidelines, stating that the guideline translates to lesser privacy and with data being logged, it would be possible to track browsing and download history. The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) put out a statement calling this directive in serious privacy violation and impacting VPN companies operating in India.

Prasanth Sugathan, Legal Director, SFLC.in noted that some providers may even choose to exit India than comply with such stringent guidelines that go against the principle of data minimisation adopted by most VPN services. A report by Reuters citing sources revealed that in a closed-door meeting many social media and tech company executives discussed strategies to urge New Delhi to put the rules on hold.
The warning
Declining on putting the rules on hold, the government issued a stark warning to VPN service providers on May 18. India’s Union Minister of State IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said there will be no changes despite the worries, saying tech companies have an obligation to know who is using their services.
“If you’re a VPN that wants to hide and be anonymous about those who use VPNs and you don’t want to go by these rules, then if you want to pull out (from the country), frankly, that is the only opportunity you will have. You will have to pull out,” Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrashekhar said.
Chandrasekhar, however, said India was being generous, as some countries mandate immediate reporting.
ExpressVPN, SurfShark, NordVPN remove servers
ExpressVPN become the first virtual private networks to reject the government’s new rules and decided to move out its servers out of India.
ExpressVPN described the cybersecurity rules as “broad” and “overreaching”. “The law is also overreaching and so broad as to open up the window for potential abuse. We believe the damage done by potential misuse of this kind of law far outweighs any benefit that lawmakers claim would come from it,” ExpressVPN said.
Indian users of ExpressVPN will still be able to use its service via “virtual” India servers located in Singapore and the UK. “We will never collect logs of user activity, including no logging of browsing history, traffic destination, data content, or DNS queries. We also never store connection logs, meaning no logs of IP addresses, outgoing VPN IP addresses, connection timestamps, or session duration,” the company said.

Surfshark VPN followed suit and announced shutting down its servers in India. The company said that VPN providers leaving India “isn’t good for its burgeoning IT sector”.
“In response to the new Indian data regulation laws, Surfshark is shutting down its servers in India. The new laws require VPN providers to record and keep customers’ logs for 180 days as well as collect and keep excessive customer data for five years,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, one more VPN provider in NordVPN too is contemplating removing its India servers. NordVPN become the third VPN provider to remove its servers from India in response to the country’s cybersecurity directive. “In the past, similar regulations were typically introduced by authoritarian governments in order to gain more control over their citizens,” NordVPN said in a statement. “If democracies follow the same path, it has the potential to affect people’s privacy as well as their freedom of speech. One way or another, this law will likely have a negative impact on people’s privacy and digital security.”

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می 27, 2022

With VPN Order, the Government Shows It’ll Leave Virtually Nothing Private

This article was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
In directions issued on April 28 by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), amidst a lush forest of legalistic whereases, nestled an order to Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers to perform a KYC (‘know your customer’) on their users and maintain usage logs for five years. The rules become enforceable next month.
The order confirms that the Modi government wants an information-asymmetric surveillance society. It wants its affairs to be perfectly opaque (think electoral bonds, the stonewalling on Pegasus) and the doings of the public to be perfectly transparent.
For VPN providers, the order is a poison pill. They sell privacy through end-to-end encryption and masking location. Requiring them to file KYCs and maintain usage logs defeats the purpose.
In fact, the order is a clever way of putting VPNs out of business in India without actually banning them, like China and Russia did. A ban would needless excite the Western press and institutions like Human Rights Watch and the UN, which are already concerned about restrictions on free speech in India, whether by internet throttling and shutdowns as in Kashmir, or by straightforward arrest, as in the case of Jignesh Mevani.
Also read: ‘Godse Bhakts in PMO’: Jignesh Mevani and BJP’s Efforts to Preserve Gujarat’s Bipolarity
Market leader NordVPN has threatened to pull its servers out of India rather than comply. For them, it’s probably not a big deal. They have only one accessible server located in Mumbai, while there are 16 in the US and four in the UK. The one-server deal is common in markets much less important than India, like Thailand and Argentina. Other providers like SurfShark say that it is technically impossible for them to store user data because it is routinely overwritten in server RAM. Others like ExpressVPN are speaking out about a “worrying attempt to infringe on the digital rights of citizens”.
Who uses VPNs? A wide spectrum, from rights workers on hostile ground to criminals, for the same reason ― to fly under the radar. Free speech proponents want to protect the former, while CERT-In wants to go after the latter. Corporates are power users, but seem to be tacitly excluded from the government’s order.
In between are regular citizens, tired of being tracked by platforms, or just trying to access the Netflix US catalogue from India. Internet technologies are dual use, because technology is morally agnostic. Before VPNs were a thing, there was The Onion Router (Tor), which bounced traffic across at least three servers to shake off trackers. Tor was created for activists in authoritarian countries, but criminals soon made it the gateway to the Darknet, where stores sold contraband from homemade drugs to assassination services (it was sobering to discover, on an assassin’s rate card, that the life of a top newspaper editor is cheaper than a minor politician’s).
Also read: Will Centre’s New Rules on User Data Collection Spark a Stand-off Between VPN Providers and Govt?
In 2016, the FBI led Operation Hyperion against the Darknet’s illegal storefronts and their customers. The onion network was compromised and Tor lost trust. The state and businesses moved in. Checking the ownership of its exit nodes, where traffic is decrypted, one found security agencies, spammers and scammers, who were obviously snooping on plaintext as it left Tor.
VPNs are like Tor, but on the question of security, the resemblance to BlackBerry is even stronger. Once Canada’s most valuable product, it closed down very quietly this January, shouldered aside by iPhones and Droids. But the fall of the cult device with the fiddly little keys and cast-iron security began in 2008, when the Manmohan Singh government demanded access to its network. There was an immediate reason: the terrorists in the Mumbai attacks had used BlackBerrys and the Indian security forces couldn’t break the encryption.
In 2013, BlackBerry buckled to keep the India market and gave real-time access to users’ mail, BBM messages and browsing data. The internet, as its name suggests, is inter-networked, and nothing happens in isolation. Users understood that if the security of one was compromised, so was the security of many. The withdrawal of trust was palpable, and if VPNs buckle to the government’s demands, they will repeat history ― without even the excuse of a 26/11, because no special threat is now visible.

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