VPNs: You Have to Love These Outfits
April 26, 2019
What does a virtual private network do to protect one’s privacy? Who are the friends of a particular VPN? Who owns the VPN? Is that individual or group of owners friends with some interesting people? Why charge a person and not provide the advertised service? (This happened to the Beyond Search goose when we were researching “Dark Web Notebook.)
These questions are difficult to answer.
One slice of light appears in the article “There’s NordVPN Odd about This, Right? Infosec types Concerned over Strange App Traffic.” I am not thrilled with the headline, but some of the information in the article — assuming that the accuracy is on the money — is thought provoking.
I noted this statement attributed to a NordVPN expert:
NordVPN spokeswoman Laura Tyrell first told us: “I would like to assure you that we have not observed any irregular behavior that could in any way support the theory of our applications being compromised by a malicious actor.” She added: “Such domains are used as an important part of our workaround in environments and countries with heavy internet restrictions. To prevent such requests from contacting the domains which aren’t owned by us, we have modified our URI scheme. All URLs are being validated, so the problem as such will never occur. It is also important to note that no sensitive data is being sent or received through these addresses.”
The author may not be a stellar headline writer, but I was able to understand this statement:
This was obviously bunkum and we said so.
If one works through the technical snippets, two things become evident:
- The NordVPN is a busy little beaver in the sending and receiving department. Busy, busy.
- The information security wizards contributing to the article are suspicious.
Net net: Maybe it is time to answer some questions about both the technical plumbing and the owners’ connections with other entities. We can maybe rule out Mr. Putin because NordVPN made the list of VPN services to be blocked in Russia. But there are other interesting friends some VPN providers may have.
Oh, those free VPN services? Yeah, not a good idea.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2019
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