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Italy’s new Piracy Shield has just gone into operation and is already harming human rights there
(walledculture.org)
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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VPNs are extremely easy to detect and block. You need to do deep packet inspection but it can be done if they're willing to pay for it.
This is what it's going to come down to, whether ISPs will be willing to eat the costs for all the blocking.
Any mid-range / price firewall solution is capable of effectively blocking most VPN solutions. Both OVPN and Wireguard VPN traffic is trivial to identify as such and block. Here's an example and another.
China's great firewall works a little bit differently. They aren't actively blocking certain kinds of traffic by default because that would mean a large DPI effort they don't want to undertake. Also if you google a bit about it you'll find that people's experiences are mostly "my VPN worked fine for a day/week/month and then it was blocked". It seems they've some IPs and domains blocked and the rest is some kind of machine learning that applies rules as it sees fit, this guy here has a good analysis of it.
All the serious companies (financial sector) I worked for so far did it, because as I linked is really easy with any cheap firewall solution.
Well... a bank could be considerar that indeed, but you know, security concerns and all.
So what? A company can use a firewall to block VPNs when the target IP isn't on some whitelist, or the source computer isn't authorized to use VPNs. On those high security setups at banks and whatnot client machines inside the company network won't need to touch a VPN to do a "remote checkup of a server" at some cloud provider as the network will be configured to internally route the traffic from all computers / users (backed by SSO/AD credential) to access those resources via a special VPN setup on some router / server.
Fortinet and WatchGuard can both distinguish a VPN from TeamViewer. They can actually do much more than that, even TeamViewer from RDP or VNC is just a couple of clicks on their UIs.
That's also the policy for the majority of the machines/users but there are a few that do have admin privileges like IT teams and whatnot and even if they manage to install a VPN solution (the app would most likely get blocked by endpoint security either way) they couldn't communicate to the outside because the firewalls, as I described, are all set to block VPN traffic. Except for those situations I specified above.
The bottom line is: distrust everything, everyone and anything. Even if you can ensure nobody can install a VPN application on their computers, assume someone might get around that and add proper firewall checks and blocks as well.