All major internet providers in Venezuela have blocked anti-censorship tools to stop health care program for medical personnel promoted by the president of the National Assembly, in the middle of a severe crisis over the COVID-19 pandemic in which over a hundred doctors have died.

Internet providers blocked Psiphon and Tunnelbear, both VPN services, and the web proxy Anonymouse. Fortunately, the impact to the VPN functionality itself is minor, with the block mostly affecting their websites, which is the most common way people have been getting the VPN software.

The VPN feature in Psiphon works perfectly and the block only affects access to their web site psiphon.ca

Preliminary tests indicate that Tunnelbear users who were already registered in the app can use VPN functionality with without any inconvenient, but some (not all) who were not previously registered and logged in to the app cannot use it.

A few days earlier, on the 2020-08-28 we reported the blockage on Airtm, which is the platform selected to deliver the program’s $100 monthly benefit #HéroesDeLaSalud. Portals of this initiative have already suffered crashes and even a phishing attack in which the traffic of thousands of users were manipulated to register to a fake portal.



Airtm had previously been blocked in 2018, as had Tunnelbear along with other VPNs in the past.

The blockage was in most cases implemented as a DNS lock, except for the blocking to Anonymouse that already existed in Movistar that works with HTTP filtering.

Update 2020-08-29: DNS block to Anonymouse.org has been lifted on CANTV




Download from alternate directions.

Both applications are still available for download from the iOS and Android app stores, also from the following alternative links:

Psiphon

Tunnelbear