01-04-2020 , 01:34 PM
How to find the best VPN service: Your guide to staying safe on the internet
You’ve heard the advice before: Whether you’re in the office or on the road, a VPN is one of the best ways to protect yourself on the internet. But how effective are VPNs? What’s the best one for you? What are the downsides? Our executive guide aims to answer all your VPN-related questions — including a few you probably haven’t thought about before.
What is a VPN?
VPN is an acronym for Virtual Private Network. The purpose of a VPN is to provide you with security and privacy as you communicate over the internet.
Here’s the problem with the internet: It’s inherently insecure. When the internet was first designed, the priority was to be able to send packets (chunks of data) as reliably as possible. Networking across the country and the world was relatively new, and nodes often went down. Most of the internet’s core protocols (methods of communicating) were designed to route around failure, rather than secure data.
The applications you’re accustomed to using, whether email, web, messaging, Facebook, etc., are all built on top of that Internet Protocol (IP) core. While some standards have developed, not all internet apps are secure. Many still send their information without any security or privacy protection whatsoever.
This leaves any internet user vulnerable to criminals who might steal your banking or credit card information, governments who might want to eavesdrop on their citizens, and other internet users who might want to spy on you for a whole range of nefarious reasons.
A VPN creates a private tunnel over the open internet. The idea is that everything you send is encapsulated in this private communications channel and encrypted so — even if your packets are intercepted — they can’t be deciphered. VPNs are very powerful and important tools to protect yourself and your data, but they do have limitations.
Read the full description of online security.
