Fresh insights from old data: corroborating reports of Turkmenistan IP unblocking and firewall testing

Cloudflare's blog post explores the recent unblocking of over 3 billion IP addresses in Turkmenistan, as reported by turkmen.news, suggesting the country might be testing a new firewall. This event led to a surge in HTTP requests from Turkmenistan, as observed on Cloudflare Radar, which is designed to track TCP connection resets and timeouts. The data from Radar revealed changes in connection anomalies across different networks in Turkmenistan, indicating potential large-scale firewall activity. Despite limitations in data interpretation, such as the inability to attribute causes definitively, the trends observed align with the hypothesis of firewall testing. The post emphasizes the importance of analyzing these resets and timeouts data both retrospectively and in the context of larger patterns, offering insights into Internet activity in Turkmenistan before and after the unblocking event. Additionally, Cloudflare shares its methodologies for detecting and logging these anomalies, encouraging similar observability practices in other networks to enhance Internet measurement science.

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