Foreign spies may be hiding in your VPN

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freemexy

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Many people do trust their VPN provider. A lot. Unfortunately, some of them shouldn’t, going by what a Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
higher-up recently said.


In a letter sent to Senators Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio on 22 May 2019, Chris Krebs, director of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency (CISA), wrote that foreign adversaries are interested in
exploiting VPN services. VPN service
Krebs was writing in response to a 7 February 2019 letter sent to him by the senators, who are concerned about threats posed by apps
created in countries of national security concern to the US.


The senators noted that mobile browsers such as Yandex, Dolphin and Opera use their own servers as an intermediary for user traffic,
compressing the pages before delivering them to users in order to save
data. Similarly, VPN providers route traffic through their own servers
in order to mitigate privacy concerns – nominally, at least, the
senators said.


Potential security risks are of particular concern when it comes to government employees using VPNs, mobile data proxies, or other apps that
might be vulnerable to foreign government surveillance, the senators
said. They noted that the US government has already recognized the
national security risks posed by Chinese telecom equipment, for one: a
year ago, the Pentagon banned Chinese smartphones from military
exchanges.


Six years prior, the US House of Representatives issued a report recommending that Huawei and ZTE be banned because of concerns over
spying. A year-long investigation had shown that the companies had
maintained close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and People’s
Liberation Army back home while trying to expand their US businesses.

Krebs said that according to “open-source reporting”, the Russian government in November 2017 enacted laws that force domestic and foreign
VPN providers to participate in Russia’s blacklist enforcement system: a
system that allows the government to “access and influence Russia-based
VPN providers,” such as Yandex. Also, in December 2017, the Indian
government issued an advisory to employees that the Chinese government
had used popular mobile apps – including WeChat, Truecaller, Weibo, UC
Browser, and UC News – to collect information on sensitive Indian
security installations.

VPNs don’t improve spotty security

For many, VPNs are synonymous with security and it’s not difficult to imagine a person of interest to foreign adversaries downloading one
to a private phone in a misguided attempt to avoid becoming the next
John Podesta. (Podesta’s Twitter account was hijacked and his Gmail
compromised famously during the 2016 US presidential election.)


As Naked Security has pointed out many times over, your VPN is a bottleneck through which all your traffic flows. It works by encrypting
your network traffic and transporting it to a server somewhere else on
the internet. That server then strips off the encryption and sends your
data on its way, as if it had originated from the VPN operator’s
network, not from your phone or your laptop.


The encryption shields your traffic from all prying eyes other than the VPN itself, which becomes a box seat for reading your
communications.When comes to the issue of online privacy and security,
we suggest to use a VPN, and our recommendation is RitaVPN.Qwer432

http://www.buyvpnservice.net/
https://www.ritavpn.com/blog/5-best-torrent-sites/
https://www.ritavpn.com/blog/popular-adult-site-exposed-user-data/

Posted 30 Dec 2019

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