Collateral Damage
Unintended blocking of legitimate services due to censorship techniques.
Definition
Collateral damage occurs when censorship measures affect services beyond their intended targets. This commonly happens with IP blocking of shared infrastructure, overly broad DNS blocks, or keyword-based filtering that matches unrelated content.
The scale of collateral damage varies from minor (a few sites sharing an IP) to massive (blocking an entire CDN or cloud provider). It's often unintentional but sometimes accepted as necessary by censors.
How We Detect This
We identify collateral damage by mapping blocked IPs and domains to their hosting infrastructure. When blocks affect cloud providers, CDNs, or shared hosting, we enumerate other services on the same infrastructure and test their accessibility. We report the ratio of intended targets to affected services.
Examples
- •Blocking one site on shared hosting affects 500 others
- •Telegram IP block disrupts Google services
- •Keyword filter blocks unrelated educational content