Why your VPN stopped working in Russia - and what still gets through

If your connection died sometime in the last year, nothing broke on your end. The detection method changed - and most VPNs never adapted.

The short version

Plain WireGuard and OpenVPN are no longer hard to spot. Deep packet inspection equipment installed at the operator level recognises their handshakes almost instantly - the traffic doesn't need to be decrypted, only identified. Once identified, it's dropped or throttled to uselessness.

What still works are protocols designed to look like something else entirely: ordinary HTTPS, a video call, a game update. That's the whole trick.

The goal stopped being "encrypt the traffic". It became "make the traffic boring".

What replaced it

Three approaches are holding up in heavily filtered networks:

• AmneziaWG - a WireGuard fork that pads packets and adds decoy handshakes so the signature stops matching. Fast, easy to deploy, actively maintained.
• VLESS / Reality - wraps traffic so it's indistinguishable from a normal TLS connection to a real website. The most resilient option, and the fiddliest to configure.
• Shadowsocks and friends - older, still useful in milder filtering, increasingly detected where filtering is aggressive.

Why protocol alone isn't enough

Even a perfectly disguised protocol fails if the server's IP address is already on a blocklist. Providers publish their server lists; censors read the same lists. This is why rotation matters as much as obfuscation - and why "we have 3,000 servers" means little if all 3,000 have been enumerated.

How to pick, in one paragraph

If your country doesn't filter VPNs, use WireGuard and enjoy the speed. If it does, start with AmneziaWG - it's the best ratio of resilience to hassle. If even that gets blocked, move to VLESS/Reality. And if a provider offers you only one protocol, that provider isn't built for censored networks.

Cypher VPN ships WireGuard and AmneziaWG

Pick the profile that matches your network. No account, paid in crypto, connected in under a minute.