Natalya Kasperskaya, co-founder of Kaspersky Lab and president of InfoWatch, published a post on the morning of April 4 in which she blamed Roskomnadzor’s blocking measures for the “collapse of half of the Runet’s services.”
“No, this is not an enemy raid or an attack by external actors or evil foreign hackers. This is our own RKN finally taking a very serious approach to fighting traffic tunneling and protection services, also known as VPNs,” she wrote.
According to Kasperskaya, there is no technical way to block VPNs “without disrupting the operation of the entire Internet.” “And the more effort and resources are poured into the DPI blocking system, the worse everything will work,” she added.
However, by the evening, after speaking with Roskomnadzor chief Andrei Lipov, Kasperskaya completely revised her position and apologized for her “hasty conclusions.”
“Andrei Yuryevich explained in detail, with examples, why yesterday’s failure was not caused specifically by Roskomnadzor’s actions. He also explained which Sberbank scenario led to the disruptions. Sberbank also confirms in its statements that this was a failure of its internal systems,” she said.
After that, Kasperskaya said that citizens “greatly lack direct communication with the state” and called on the Ministry of Digital Development and other agencies to “explain to people what is happening” in order to avoid “speculation, frightening rumors, and a wave of the worst assumptions.”
Earlier, Roskomnadzor demanded that a number of media outlets and Telegram channels delete reports claiming that the agency’s blocking measures had triggered a mass banking outage on April 3. At the end of March, Roskomnadzor also demanded that “Ostorozhno, novosti” delete a report saying the agency was unable to cope with blocking efforts.