VPN services

Donut417 · February 3, 2014

Looking in to hotspot shield or some similar service. Reason Im looking at Hotspot shield is it looks like its not badly priced. Im just concerned with all the hacking going around that a VPN might be a good choice. Hell, Target and now Micheal's is now claiming they have been hacked in to during the holiday season. The IRS is concerned that the same group might hit the eFile servers for taxes, claiming they can steal people refunds. IRS instructed us to eFile as early as possible. Im just thinking a VPN service although cant protect me when the servers I connect to get hack, but can protect the data as it gets to those servers. Basically reduce my self as a target. I make purchases online, mostly Steam, Newegg, Amazon. I've even had my debit card number stolen. I think it might have been a gas station as people are able to put scanners on the credit card readers on the pumps and get information that way.

I just really want to know if these services do offer the protection they claim? Will this affect my internet connectivity as far as for gaming?

YouRezz · February 3, 2014

in gaminig you'll have higher ping and your connection will be slower..

I only use vpn at school as they block alot of websites and its just a pain in the arse to deal with them otherwise

LividPanda · February 4, 2014

I would have to strongly suggest not going with Hotspot Sheild, I've said it multiple times and I will continue to go on being a bore about it. They offer little to no information as to what type of encryption they use and it does not look like IPSEC. The vast majority of VPN services use PPTP and frequently used with MSCHAPv2. In short, PPTP's strength is based on however strong your password is - people don't make strong passwords. The problem with MSCHAPv2 is Windows is incompetent when it comes to protocols and if you look at a flow chart as to how it works they seem to think if you hash it enough all their problems will go away, this is not true. Moreover, the major problem with MSCHAPv2 is instead of using 3DES - which is multiplicative complexity they decided to just use DES three times, that is additive complexity. Multiplicative and additive are not the same thing when it comes to a brute force or dictionary attack, additive being much much easier. Why do people still use PPTP? I don't know. Your other option like I mentioned earlier is L2TP w/ IPSEC this is a secure protocol with no glaring issues like PPTP. It is built to be integrated with IPV6, it supports tunneling - so end to end encryption, has a more secure authentication protocol, and is just newer and updated. A VPN will not help you if a point of sale machine gets compromised, like that Target breach that happened recently. The attackers actually pulled the data out of volatile memory because PCI standards don't let you store that data on the point of sale machine, obviously. That is a very sophisticated attack, and damn impressive. Target or any other business like it doesn't care about security, I would be willing to bet that they were not the ones who noticed the breach. You know who is extremely good a noticing this type of thing? American Express. Would not be surprised if AE or Chase noticed odd purchases and then cross referenced something they all have in common, Target. I wouldn't save you CC information on any site and I would use a VPN USING IPSEC (www.privateinternetaccess.com) and HTTPS Everywhere plugin on your browser.