Our ability to access online content depends on where we are based. Websites, platforms, organisations, and even entire countries may choose to restrict access to certain content based on geographic location. This practice, commonly known as geoblocking, primarly relies on detecting a user’s IP address to determine their whereabouts.
The motivations beind these restrictions may range from copyright and licensing agreements to a government’s efforts to limit a population’s access to information, often driven by political or ideological agendas. As a result, this inability to access specific online content can range from a mild inconvenience to overt oppression. Regardless of the reason, geoblocked content can pose a serious obstacle when conducting open source investigations.
Virtual Private Networks
Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) often bypasses this restriction by changing the user’s IP address to one associated with a permitted location. But what if you don’t have access to a VPN, or the one you are using does not offer a useful region as an option?
I have dealt with this issue when investigating the activities of individuals, groups, organisations, and even governments. There is a wealth of information hidden behind regional restrictions, especially when looking into regimes determined to suppress dissent and control the narratives. But if we cannot access it, we cannot use it.
A good VPN is an essential tool for OSINT analysts or anyone serious about their digital security. However, they are not always accessible due to limitations related to cost, legal restrictions, or detection by state-level firewalls.
Alternatives to VPNs to bypass geoblocked content
Fortunately there are powerful, and often overlooked, alternatives hiding in plain sight: web archive services! The biggest player in the field is the well known Wayback Machine, but there are others that shouldn’t be overlooked.
If you are into open source intelligence chances are you are very well versed in these platforms. They provide a way to access information that may no longer be accessible. Perhaps a look into the first version of a controversial news article, or a list of names no longer present on a website, or simply as a window into the internet of the past.
But web archive services are not just amazing at digging up old versions of web pages; they can do so much more! I regularly use these platforms as my own personal sneaky assistants when trying to access restricted content online. Why go through the trouble of figuring out which region is not geoblocked, changing my VPN server location, and testing it out, when I can just ask the Wayback Machine (or a similar service) to do the dirty work for me..?
Work smart, not hard, right?
How to use the Wayback Machine to bypass geoblocked content
Let me show you how it works with a couple of examples, starting with Econodata, a website claiming to host a database of over 14 million Brazilian companies. There is a lot of potential value here, but unfortunately the website is heavily restricted to most countries. Unless you are accessing it from Brazil, the United States of America, or possibly a few others (I haven’t tested all 195 nations), here is what you’ll likely be presented with when attempting to load the page:
It is a minor inconvenience, but one that is fairly easy to bypass. Using a VPN to trick the website into thinking we’re in Brazil would be the obvious solution, but for a quick (and harmless) task like this, it’s not really necessary. Instead, we can ask the Wayback Machine to fetch and display the information for us by simply feeding it the direct link to our target page.
Since I was not particularly fussed about which company to use for my example (and also didn’t want to give away the types of companies I might actually be interested in..), I chose XP Inc., the very last entry on the “List of companies in Brazil” Wikipedia page.
A quick Google search with the string site:econodata.com.br XP Inc. provides us with the direct link, as seen below.
With our target URL in hand, we just need to check whether the Wayback Machine already has a recent snapshot. If it doesn’t, we can request it to archive the page by clicking the “Save this URL in the Wayback Machine” button, and confirm it by selecting the “Save Page” on the next page.
Either way, with just a couple of clicks we have sidestepped a restriction and managed to access the page without having to rely on VPN acrobatics. We went from “Forbidden” to being able to read the entire contents of the page in a few simple clicks, and even archived the page for future reference, as seen below.
Using other web archiving services to view geoblocked content
This strategy is great, but sometimes even the Wayback Machine may fail at its task.
I decided to test which Russian government websites were geoblocked, just for the fun of it. I simply searched for: site:.gov.ru and tried opening a few links. Росморречфлот, the second result on the list (which leads to the Federal Agency for Marine and River Transport), was not happy with my attempt to connect and returned a “403 Forbidden” error.
I turned to the Wayback Machine to try to bypass the regional restriction, but was met with multiple archived pages, all displaying the same 403 error I previously encountered.
In cases like this, my advice is to simply try a different web archiving platform. I switched to Archive.today, which performed much better. It allowed me to view an older snapshot of the page, and even gave me the option to request a new one. I did not want to waste resources, so I chose not to archive it again. It’s good to be mindful of things like that.
Still, just look at how satisfying it is to go from a “403 Forbidden” error to accessing geoblocked content with such ease!
Conclusion
Overall, there’s more than one way to get around geoblocking. A VPN is useful, but it’s far from the only tool at our disposal. Web archiving services like the Wayback Machine and Archive.today offer surprisingly effective and low-effort alternatives and, between you and me, they are also great at bypassing paywalls…
I hope next time you need to access restricted content, you’ll remember to try these techniques.
Thank you for reading.
Sofia.
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