Amnezia VPN restores premium service in Russia following devastating state-sponsored cyberattack | Tech Radar

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Amnezia VPN restores premium service in Russia following devastating state-sponsored cyberattack

The provider has brought its premium tier back online and updated its proprietary protocol

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Amnezia VPN has restored its Premium service in Russia

Amnezia Free is expected return in the coming weeks

Roskomnadzor blocked over 90% of its local servers between June 1 and 15

Russian privacy provider Amnezia VPN has successfully restored its Premium service for users in the country, after suffering an unprecedented state-backed infrastructure strike.

Between June 1 and June 15, millions of Amnezia users in Russia lost their connection after the state censor, Roskomnadzor (RKN), launched a multi-pronged offensive that blocked over 90% of the provider's local servers.

The strike represents a dramatic escalation in Moscow's digital crackdown, deploying automated network fingerprinting and targeted cyberattacks to actively hunt down VPN infrastructure.

While the Premium tier is now back online with a newly updated, stealthier protocol, Amnezia has confirmed that its Free tier's Russian stack will return in the coming weeks.

For internet users trapped behind Russia's "sovereign internet" firewall, the stakes have never been higher. Identifying the best VPN has become a critical lifeline to the free web as the state dumps massive resources into its censorship machine.

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A sophisticated, $898 million censorship machine

According to Amnezia’s incident analysis, Roskomnadzor has abandoned basic IP-blocking in favor of a highly automated, aggressive ruleset.

By analyzing network traffic, Russian authorities appear to have learned to identify the unique "network fingerprint" of specific VPN protocols — Amnezia's proprietary Amnezia WG protocol included.

Once RKN's internet censorship and filtering system (known as TSPU) detects this fingerprint, it automatically blacklists the server's IP address. During the June assault, Amnezia attempted to swap out its servers, only to see the fresh IP addresses blocked within hours.

This technological leap is heavily state-funded. Forbes Russia and Kommersant estimate nearly 60 billion roubles (770million) is being spent to strengthen the filtering system, while The Moscow Times projects a wider RKN budget allocation of 70billion roubles (898 million) between 2026 and 2028.

To compound the technical assault, RKN paired its deep packet inspection with traditional hacking tactics, launching active DDo S attacks on VPN services. THis wave of attacks even targeted the Amnezia website, while deploying phishing schemes against the provider's staff.

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Mazay Banzaev, founder of Amnezia VPN, believes this escalation is a proof that Roskomnadzor had been preparing a new set of rules for the TSPU for a long time, and fully applied them on June 1. He now expects these measure to be extended to other services operating in Russia.

"Such practices have been used in other countries too, Iran and China, for example, but in Russia they have been taken to a new level of automation: on average, a server is blocked within a few hours of users beginning to connect to it," said Banzaev.

Despite the severity of the attack, Amnezia confirmed that no infrastructure was breached and user data remained secure, crediting regular security audits by independent cybersecurity firm 7ASecurity.

To bypass the new TSPU ruleset, Amnezia has dropped a new version of its Amnezia WG protocol. This update strips out the specific feature that allowed censors to identify the VPN traffic in the first place. Users must update their Amnezia VPN client to restore their connection, as the provider has intentionally disabled older, vulnerable versions of the app to prevent repeat attacks.

To make up for the downtime, Amnezia is also compensating affected users. Premium subscribers on a 6-month plan will receive one extra month of service, while those on 12-month plans will receive two additional months.

The provider now has its sights set on future expansion, noting that interest in circumventing state censorship continues to surge globally. Amnezia plans to expand its network to 100 locations while developing new, open-source methods to outsmart the censors.

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Rene Millman is a seasoned technology journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, the Financial Times, Computer Weekly, and IT Pro. With over two decades of experience as a reporter and editor, he specializes in making complex topics like cybersecurity, VPNs, and enterprise software accessible and engaging.

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