These are the measures to check if your VPN is being secure
The whole world shuddered when Edward Snowden brought out declassified documents about the secret electronic mass surveillance program. This was enough to think about how valuable our data are, not only for the espionage agencies, but also for social network administrators, advertising and marketing experts. Not to mention hackers, crackers, phreakers, spywares, viruses and malwares.
For that reason, Virtual Private Networks (VPN) have become so popular in the world, because they offer high levels of privacy thanks to the use of Tunneling, Authentication, Access Control and Encryption technologies. Basically, what it does is mask your IP address to prevent traffic from being spied on.
However, we must keep in mind that VPNs are safe, but not infallible, even more if they are exposed to failure due to human factors or connection instability. In addition, in the cumbersome process of configuring the VPN, we may have neglected some step that leads to a possible failure of the encryption and transmission protocols, allowing to filter the real IP through RTC. And what is to be said about free VPNs, where the gratuity is “paid” with the privacy of our data, an avalanche of advertising and a much slower connection.
How can we be sure that our VPN is being 100% effective?
Check this list where we offer you some tools to check if there is any leak in your VPN connection.
- Check for DNS leaks: Domain Name Systems (DNS) are a way of naming computers connected to IP networks and their function is to “translate” domain names into binary identifiers to locate and manage devices. A VPN that is too slow or too saturated takes a long time to respond to an access request, so a DNS Leaks can occur because Windows switches to standard unencrypted DNS servers, leaving our traffic vulnerable. To find out if your VPN is being affected by the DNS leak, you can examine it from the DNS Leak Test site. In case this happens, set a static IP address if you use DHCP before you connect to the VPN. Then you will only have to disable the standard DNS configuration, so that Windows only finds the DNS of the VPN. Once you finish using it, reactive DHCP and reconfigures the standard DNS.
- Monitor your IP: When we use a VPN our IP address is masked and the system creates a different IP. It is said that VPNs protect our IP, but what if it is filtered by some bad practice. To be sure everything is fine, you can use VPNetMon to check if the IP address assigned by the Virtual Private Network closes the programs you say when it detects that the IP address changes, indicating that you have left the VPN. You can also check if there are leaks of IP addresses with your active VPN.
- WebRTC Leak Test: To use voice and video chats in the web browser without the need to install plugins or external extensions, many people use WebRTC, an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows the sharing of P2P files. However, our IP can be filtered when we use WebRTC APIs. You should better disable WebRTC in your browser to prevent such leaks.
If you still have a few minutes, learn in our YouTube channel How to configure a Site-to-Site VPN using a Barracuda NextGen Firewall F-Series Vx?
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