Using VPN for internet safety? These VPN products have serious privacy flaws

A publication released by vpnMentor shows that three popular VPN products have some serious privacy flaws.
All the three solutions have problems which can allow an attacker to:

Hijack all the traffic from user
Establish user's real IP address
Get the DNS used by user

Which VPN products are affected?

Number of vulnerabilities have been found in these three VPN products. However it needs to be noted, the researchers only tested few products and:

Hotspot Shield
PureVPN
Zenmate VPN

It's been also reported that at the time of publication Hotspot Shield already fixed the issues.

We believe that most other VPNs suffer from similar issues, so the fast response of Hotspot Shield is something we think is worth commending.

What does this mean to a VPN user?

VPNs are not as safe as many may think.

The leaks allow governments, hostile organizations, or individuals to identify the actual IP address of a user, even with the use of the VPNs.

The fact that we found leaks in all the VPNs that we tested is worrying.

The full publication can be found here: vpnMentor.com

Sort Order:

Trending

[-]

steeemlover (64) · 7 years ago

nice article on hacks thanks

$0.05

1 vote

voluntary-io (43) · 7 years ago

Thanks for good feedback @steeemlover

$0.00

mightbemike (31) · 7 years ago (edited)

What a lame sample they chose to test. They hand picked 3 lousy ones out of all the possible VPNs to test. At least test a bunch before making sweeping generalizations about VPN providers.

$0.04

I agree that the group of products chosen isn't really representative of the whole sector. The research however raises awareness of threats.

mightbemike (31) · 7 years ago

Agreed - if you picked 3 at random to test, you'd probably get 3 lousy ones. Most of them are, so maybe this sample isn't terrible after all. Also it's always worth mentioning how free VPNs always suck. Thanks again for the article.