Concern about PIA (VPN)

tortilaman · April 27, 2019

I found this article in relation to nordvpn, but there was one line at the end that now has me concerned about PIA's practices and security:

Quote

We've also seen PIA make odd connections to random IPs. In their case it was random UDP connections on port 8888.

I wouldn't want LTT unknowingly signing up viewers with a malicious actor, regardless of if they're paying the bills or not. That being said, what I saw on PIA seems much less shady than the rest of my linked article on Nordvpn.

TetraSky · April 27, 2019

PIA use port 8888 quite a lot for speed testing different servers, nothing wrong with that.

From their forum staff

Quote

PIAKaneesha

September 2017 Posts: 52

Hello SteveL,

What you are seeing with the 8888 port is the port running our speed test. Our application will typically contact port 8888 on a bunch of servers to measure how fast the connection to our servers are. This will happen when you connect to Auto server as it will choose the fastest one.

It's also found in their documentation, also written by the same staff.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/helpdesk/kb/articles/pdf/what-ports-are-used-by-your-vpn-service

Quote

What ports are used by your VPN service?
Kaneesha D. - 2018-05-29 - in Questions

In order to connect to our service using one of the VPN methods we provide, please verify you can connect over these ports:
For OpenVPN connections
UDP ports 1194, 1197, 1198, 8080, 9201 and 53 as well as TCP ports 502, 501, 443, 110, 80
L2TP uses UDP 500, 1701, and 4500
PPTP uses TCP 1723 or Protocol 47 (GRE)
If you can connect over any of those, you should be able to use at least one of our
connection methods.

In addition, the PIA application pings our gateways over port 8888. This is used to connect you to the server with the lowest latency when you use the auto connect feature.

We also have more in-depth information on our OpenVPN ports including the protocols, settings and certificates that should be used with them in this article.

Disabling auto connect or even outright blocking port 8888 on your network should "fix" any sort of "issues" someone might have with this port's access.