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

Fresh insights from old data show Cloudflare Radar detecting a surge of HTTP requests from Turkmenistan in mid-June 2024, aligning with reports of Turkmenistan unblocking over 3 billion previously blocked IP addresses. According to turkmen[.]news, one reason for the unblocking was that Turkmenistan may have been testing a new firewall, with the Turkmen government’s tight control over Internet access well documented.

The blog notes that these observations come from passive measurement, and that Radar data cannot reveal attribution, though it can corroborate what was reported. The analysis emphasises that the resets and timeouts data offer a different angle on connectivity and potential firewall activity, while highlighting that trends are not definitive proof of new firewalls, but are consistent with such a scenario.

Cloudflare urges readers to consider retrospective context and to use Radar’s data alongside other measurements to form a broader view of network events in Turkmenistan.