VPNs What? why? where?
There has been an increase in the articles about VPNs and how great they are for web browsing and that VPNs protect your data, making it harder to collect your data.
We are also told that we can bypass the region rules set by specific apps, for example, Netflix to see shows that we don't have in our country of origin.
But how does that work?
What is a VPN?
VPN or Virtual Private network takes a private network and allows a user to access it even when they are connected to a public network.
For example, if you are at Starbucks using the Wi-Fi, you will be able to access your private network, IE, your router/modem.
You can confirm this by first connecting to the Starbucks Wi-Fi without your VPN. Then do a google search what my IP. You will see your current IP address. Let us assume that you have a VPN to your home network.
When you turn on the VPN on your computer, check again, and your IP will change to your home network's external-facing IP address.
For a majority of VPNs, they use encryption to protect your data by obfuscation via a tunneling protocol. The encryption is done as the data moves down the OSI model mentioned in a previous post, and it gets encrypted at each step.
https://www.atphinn.com/blog/the-best-trick-to-troubleshooting
In essence, it works as follows:
You browse to a site
Your computer with a VPN then will make a call to your private network with your access credentials
The network validates your credentials sent by the VPN.
You are correct and allows you access to the private network.
The private network then makes a call through the internet for the website.
That data is then sent back to your computer for you to see the website
Why use a VPN?
For a regular user using a VPN can be used to access region-locked sites since most VPNs have networks across the world. You can access them via their apps. These "private networks" to tell websites that you are in another country.
It would help if you used a VPN when you are connected to a public network, like hotel wifi. When you are using the hotel wifi, your information is being sent without any protection—making it easy for a malicious actor to collect and read your data while you are browsing the web. As mention previously, with a VPN, your information is encrypted, making it harder to read.
For Corporations, VPNs are used for protection of data, but also allows users to access files that are hosted in a corporate network located in a different location.
They are a lot of VPNs, how do I choose?
VPNs are an excellent way to add a layer of security to your browsing session. When picking a VPN, I look for ones that don't keep logs. So if it is compromised, there is almost no data available.
Below is a list of VPNs that I used.
https://the-bestvpn.com/vpns-do-not-keep-logs/
Unfortunately, not many free VPNs remove these logs, BUT there is an open-source program called TOR that some believe hides your identity and data better than any VPN.
But we will go over Tor in the next article.