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

[Jeremy Rand]

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?

My first instinct is "look at whether the GeoIP database acquired a bug 
around that time".  Beyond that, not my area of competence, so no clue.

Cheers,
-- 
-Jeremy Rand
Lead Application Engineer at Namecoin
Mobile email: jeremyrandmobile at airmail.cc
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