[tor-talk] Unusual Tor's spikes in Egypt and Turkey on 28th August

[Tommy Collison]

On 9/20/17 2:35 AM, Roman Mamedov wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Sep 2017 11:24:57 +0200
> Fabio Pietrosanti - Lists <lists at infosecurity.ch> wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> a close friend (faffa) noticed that on 28th August 2017 there was an
>> unusual spike of Tor traffic in Egypt and Turkey:
>>
>> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2017-06-22&end=2017-09-20&country=tr&events=off
>>
>> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2017-06-22&end=2017-09-20&country=eg&events=off
>>
>>
>> Does anyone already analyzed those spikes and understood what happened?
> 
> Egypt on Aug 28:
> 
> https://afteegypt.org/right_to_know-2/publicationsright_to_know-right_to_know-2/2017/06/04/13069-afteegypt.html?lang=en
> "Update 2.0.0 (29 August 2017)
> On the 28th of August, 261 websites providing VPN and Proxy services where found blocked.
> A new section was added to the report containing a schedule that lists monitored websites that provides VPN and Proxy services."
> 
> https://www.reddit.com/r/Egypt/comments/6wkbcw/did_they_seriously_just_block_vpns/
> 
> But it seems puzzling the spike was just for 1 day and then back to
> just exactly the previous level.
> 

It's weird that the traffic spike is only one day long. I've been
wondering about this all afternoon.

For whatever it's worth, initial downloads of Tor in Arabic seem to dip
at the same time. Graph: https://i.imgur.com/FsYQoVu.png from Tor
Metrics data.

Tommy