[tor-talk] Tor users from Finland jumped from 25 000 to 200 000

[Nurmi, Juha]

Hello,

There have been around 25 000 Tor users from Finland. The number of users
is very stable. Except right now I see a spike of 200 000 Tor users
connected from Finland. Number of users starts to increase on Tuesday
2021-12-21.

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2021-10-13&end=2022-01-11&country=fi&events=off

In addition, there is a spike in non-direct bridge users from Finland as
well.

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-country.html?start=2021-10-13&end=2022-01-11&country=fi

All this is happening only in Finland and we can easily see that from other
countries nearby, like Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the number of connected
users is flat stable. For instance, see numbers from Sweden:

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2021-10-13&end=2022-01-11&country=se&events=off

Someone could speculate that this is some kind of test carried out from
Finnish IP range or a bot network infecting only Finnish machines like
poorly configured home routers and installing malware communicating through
Tor. Furthermore, there was known Tor censorship in Russia in December, see
https://blog.torproject.org/tor-censorship-in-russia/.

The fact we know is the increasing number of Tor users from Finland. Do we
actually know something concrete behind this?

Regards,
Juha