According to cyber security experts, the new technological measures have been implemented in recent weeks.
They were felt acutely recently, when the government briefly blocked access to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, pushing people to turn on VPNs to discover the workarounds were no longer effective.
Tens of thousands of websites are blocked in Turkey. The government imposes full-scale blocks of social media sites during times of unrest. Also, individual social media users are permanently blocked, so that some Twitter accounts are not accessible inside the country.
As such, many users in Turkey have become adept at employing tools like VPNs, which allow people to ‘tunnel’ through the internet and surf the web as if they were not in Turkey, but another country. They can then utilize another nation's less restrictive cyber laws.
The Turkish authorities ‘have released an automatic, dynamic algorithm to their firewall that's been actively blocking’ secure connections, said one VPN provider who admitted this is ‘wreaking havoc’ on its services.
‘We've seen that they had impact when people tried to switch on their VPNs,’ said Alp Toker, who helps run Turkey Blocks, a monitoring group.
He noted that the authorities are using what is known as deep-pocket inspections to interfere with the functionality of virtual networks.
