![]() ![]() However, IPVanish's continued support for the severely outdated and unsecure PPTP VPN protocol gives me pause. That's a 180 from what happened in 2018 - and two owners ago - when IPVanish gave authorities customer information that led to the arrest of an accused child predator and upended the VPN's no-logs claim, which Hodge detailed in her previous IPVanish review. "None of the distinctive port numbers, IP addresses, hostnames or other test data were found to have been logged anywhere on the system." "Leviathan found no evidence of logging of IPVanish user traffic, content, or destination addresses that would contradict or violate their published privacy policy," Leviathan wrote in the audit. To this end, IPVanish released in April an independent audit and certification by Leviathan Security Group, a Seattle-based security consulting and risk management firm. IPVanish says it keeps zero traffic logs or records of your online activities. "In short, there is no way for a consumer to hide VPN usage."Īn IPVanish host was identified during my leak tests when connected to IPVanish servers in New York and other locations. By using a simple, free lookup service provided by ipinfo.io, any consumer or organization can trace an IP address back to its owner and determine whether it is used by a VPN," Sthanu said in an email. "Regardless of what the host name is, governments and businesses are very easily able to identify VPN usage by tracing the IP addresses. This also happened when I enabled the OpenVPN Scramble feature.įollowing this review's publication, IPVanish VP of Strategy and Products Subbu Sthanu argued consumers can't hide VPN use because IP address ownership by a VPN is often publicly verifiable. It can also make it harder to overcome geoblocking on streaming sites. ![]() This is concerning because even if your actual online activity may not be exposed, it can reveal your VPN usage to websites, schools or business network administrators, and any government authorities. I did not detect any IP leaks in any of my recent tests but, like reviewers at CNET's sister site ZDNet found, I also noticed that DNS leak-testing sites identified an IPVanish host when testing through servers in New York, Toronto and Singapore. On its website, IPVanish mentions that its software provides built-in DNS leak protection by using private DNS servers to resolve web addresses. IPVanish only offers the option to enable DNS leak protection on its Windows client. "There are also randomization selection algorithms of those best possible servers to avoid saturation." ![]() "We use algorithms to determine the location closest to the user, we also have other algorithms to filter out servers with heavy load or even unusual large pings to make sure the best possible server is chosen," IPVanish said in an email. When asked how the Quick Connect feature works, IPVanish said that the Best Available option relies on algorithms to connect you to a server. Similarly, the Best Available feature connected me to the 45th best UK server in terms of traffic load. My speeds increased fivefold: While connected to the designated Best Available server in France, I got speeds around 55Mbps when I connected manually to a French server with a lighter traffic load, I got around 270 Mbps. So I manually connected to a different server in France showing light user traffic and lower ping rates. Speeds to the UK and France were inconsistent and the speed drop was drastic, even though I was supposedly connecting to the best available servers in those countries. ![]()
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