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Privacy-Busting Bugs Found in Popular VPN Services Hotspot Shield, Zenmate and PureVPN (zdnet.com)
A report by VpnMentor, a website which ranks VPN services, reveals several vulnerabilities in Hotspot Shield, Zenmate, and PureVPN -- all of which promise to provide privacy for their users. VpnMentor says it hired a team of three external ethical hackers to find vulnerabilities in three random popular VPNs. While one hacker wants to keep his identity private, the other two are known as File Descriptor and Paulos Yibelo. ZDNet: The research reveals bugs that can leak real-world IP addresses, which in some cases can identify individual users and determine a user's location. In the case of Hotspot Shield, three separate bugs in how the company's Chrome extension handles proxy auto-config scripts -- used to direct traffic to the right places -- leaked both IP and DNS addresses, which undermines the effectiveness of privacy and anonymity services. [...] AnchorFree, which makes Hotspot Shield, fixed the bugs, and noted that its mobile and desktop apps were not affected by the bugs. The researchers also reported similar IP leaking bugs to Zenmate and PureVPN.
So what VPN provider do you people recommend?
Use a real VPN client like openvpn with appropriate firewall rules instead.
Opinion: All VPN's have CIA backdoors and are heavily monitored.
Change my mind.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously folks, you want a cheap secure VPN to do whatever you want with? Rent yourself a t2.micro instance on Amazon Web Services, setup OpenVPN and go crazy. It's not even exceptionally difficult. You control it all, the logs, the keys, the server, you decide what gets saved and what gets discarded.
The cost? About $9/mo for the instance runtime, plus your bandwidth (first 1GB is free, after that, 9 cents a GB, previously I'd posted you pay for bandwidth in both directions, but that's not true. You pay for data out, not data in.)