The Russian government has blocked another encrypted email provider, according to a Russian digital rights organization and the email provider.
Last Wednesday, roskomsvoboda, which describes itself as "the first Russian public organization active in the field of digital rights protection and expansion of digital opportunities", reported that an unknown Russian state organization had ordered the blocking of Skiff, an email and cloud service provider launched last year.
Blocking Skiff comes three years after Russia blocked similar encrypted email services ProtonMail y Tutanota, showing that President Vladimir Putin's regime is cracking down on encrypted communication services that allow its citizens to have more difficult-to-eavesdropping conversations.
The Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. The Russian government's censorship authority, commonly known as Roskomnadzor, also did not respond to an email seeking comment. The Roskomnadzor list of blocked sites did not list Skiff as blocked at the time of publication.
Stanislav Shakirov, technical director and co-founder of Roskomsvoboda, said that the blocking is in full effect and that "the blocking is done by the ISP on their computers using the URL mask (*.skiff.com) and IP addresses."
Shakirov explained that this has the effect of blocking Skiff.com and all of its subdomains, "therefore Russian users who do not use VPNs, browser plugins or circumvention tools like Tor or Psiphon cannot access the services of Skiff.»
Skiff's Milich said the company has seen an 81% decrease in traffic from Russia since a few weeks ago., and also shared a video of a user in Russia trying to log into Skiff, which ends with the user seeing a connection error. Milich added that he has received several complaints from users in Russia that the service is no longer usable. According to Skiff, the company has half a million users in Russia.
