A major VPN service has shut down its business operations in Russia with immediate effect, after the country's parliament instituted new anti-terror online surveillance law and began seizing servers.

Private Internet Access, which operates in many countries worldwide, blamed the new laws—which require Russian ISPs to log and hold onto both metadata and the actual content of messages for at least six months—for its abrupt departure. Fugitive NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who currently lives in the country, dubbed it "Russia's new Big Brother law."

“We believe that due to the enforcement regime surrounding this new law, some of our Russian Servers (RU) were recently seized by Russian Authorities, without notice or any type of due process,” Private Internet Access said in a blog post on Monday. "Upon learning of the [seizure], we immediately discontinued our Russian gateways and will no longer be doing business in the region."

The firm claimed its customers' data couldn't be compromised as traffic and session information isn't logged by design. "Our users are, and will always be, private and secure," it said.

The move has nevertheless prompted a "preventative" security update, which will see Private Internet Access rotate its certificates. "Furthermore," it said, "we’re updating our client applications with improved security measures to mitigate circumstances like this in the future, on top of what is already in place.

"In addition, our manual configurations now support the strongest new encryption algorithms including AES-256, SHA-256, and RSA-4096."

As a final measure, Private Internet Access will also begin to evaluate the legal status of other countries.