China Internet Crackdown ban unauthorized VPN

China continue to moderate their netizen users and growing, now banning unauthorized VPN.

The move by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) makes most VPN service providers in the country of 730 million Internet users illegal. If you operate a similar VPN services, this means that you need to get an approval first before you can use it. I’m assuming they want to see what’s going in and out of that encrypted tunnel, that’s beat the purpose of using this service.

The use of VPN or Virtual Private Network is to add security and privacy to the public networks. The main objective is to use VPN to protect the communication from source to destination in an encrypted tunnel to protect sensitive data.

“A notice released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Sunday said that all special cable and VPN services on the mainland needed to obtain prior government approval – a move making most VPN service providers illegal.

The “clean-up” of the nation’s internet connections would start immediately and run until March 31, 2018, the notice said.

China’s cybersecurity chiefs pledge total loyalty to leadership under Xi

“China’s internet connection service market … has signs of ­disordered development that ­require urgent regulation and governance,” the ministry said.
The crackdown on unregulated internet connections aimed to “strengthen cyberspace information security management”.” (2017, South China Morning Post)

Continue reading at South China Morning Post while still available. You never know when the Chinese government will shutdown access 🙂