My company allowed us to work remotely for the past 1.5 years due to the pandemic
I’ve been working remotely (in the US). I’ve been entertaining the idea of working outside of the US for temporary change. A few workers started to work from lower cost of living states or even working abroad. Unfortunately, my company announced a new restriction for remote workers. The remote worker must be in US.
I am assuming my company might be checking on our IP address to determine our locations when we connect to the VPN.
Bear with me, I’m not a network guru. How can I connect to my work VPN without them knowing I’m connecting outside the US? Assume I have my server at home (in US) connected to the internet.
I just transitioned from Infrastructure to InfoSec. If your company has any halfway decent Security team with the proper tools and SIEM, you WILL be caught, especially if they cared to even make that announcement.
Sorry to burst your bubble OP. Looking for a new job while employed would be far easier than having to look due to being fired about lying about your location.
PS: I’m literally in Phuket right now. So depending on the company and the team, you have options outside your company. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to ask. I worked for a company with this policy before but I was also under the Security manager…they overlooked my dalliances overseas because I got shit done.
If they care enough to monitor it, they will be able to tell that you are not connecting directly to their VPN endpoint. If they don’t monitor it, there’s still a chance that they may notice somehow or that you may slip up and reveal that you are not where they think you are. Only do this if you don’t mind getting caught at some point.
Not sure how technical you want to go but I’m in a similar boat to you and this is what I did: buy a Raspberry Pi and install PiVPN. Set up the Raspberry Pi as your VPN server on your home internet. PiVPN has good instructions on this and makes it easy-ish to set up but you may have to set up port forwarding on your router. Also, I recommend WireGuard over OpenVPN for when you’re configuring your server.
Now you need a VPN client to connect to your VPN server. Technically you could download WireGuard on your computer and connect to your VPN server, but you don’t want your employer to see you download VPN software so this is where a VPN router comes in handy. A popular VPN router for traveling is the Slate. You can configure your WireGuard client on this router. I recommend doing this on a non-work computer so you can update router firmware and set up the kill switch on the router in case it fails. The idea is you’ll connect your work computer to this router and never use your laptop’s wifi or your location will be leaked. Before connecting to your company’s VPN you’ll hook up the configured VPN router to your work laptop (via Ethernet, USB, whatever) and be able to connect to a local network in a different country but automatically tunnel your connection to your VPN server at home via your WireGuard client. As I mentioned above, you should activate the kill switch for the router so if the VPN fails it won’t just use a local network to connect to the work VPN and leak your IP.
If you want to be extra careful in case your Raspberry Pi server fails then you can google instructions on how to set up a WireGuard server on AWS. I say AWS because they have data centers in different states so you can specify one that’s near you. Of course your IP will look like it’s coming from a data center but it’s still better than another country. I haven’t left the country yet with this setup but I’ve tested from different states and the speeds are fine (my work VPN is the biggest bottleneck honestly). Best of luck!
I’m EU based yet my girlfriend is from outside the EU. We have a second property in her home country.
Some local services (bank, some tv channels) where she is from only work when connecting through a local IP. We set up a small raspberry PI device in our second home that is always on, that allows us to connect through to mask our location as ‘local’ to her native country.
Cost <100 EUR and works well, but you need to have some tech skills to set this up.
But as others have said… perhaps find a different job if you want to travel? Shouldn’t be much of an issue post COVID.
There are most likely tax implications. Not only you may get in trouble if you are found to be working out of the US. Your company may get in trouble too.
Ensure you understand the reasons for the limitations and maybe you and your company can find a workaround.
There is likely legal reasons that they require you to be a USA resident for. Ask them if you can go on a working vacation for 3 months to another country. They might be tolerant of that, as long as you remain tax resident in the USA, and maintain a US address.
Permanently residing in a different country is completely different than visiting for a few months.
Don’t lie or trick your company. There could be very important reasons why they don’t want employees living in other countries.
Start looking for other offers but also consider seeing if they would switch you to a consultant/contractor position that would be open to you traveling abroad. Like others said, they may find out eventually.
Sorry not answering your question but I think a really important question to ask yourself is ‘am I willing to lose my job for this’ - because there is a very real potential for this to happen. If they have specifically said you can’t do it, and you then go and do it, the moment they find out it will be bad news. This is different to those whose companies have said nothing or were already doing it when rules changed. Seems a pretty significant risk.
Sooner or later they will discover that you are not in the US and liberate you from your job. There are things that you can do but in an area with spotty WiFi where the net goes up and down you can momentarily lose your protection and reveal where you actually are.
This is probably a stupid question but why would the following not work: turn on mobile hotspot on personal phone which has a ‘home’ SIM in it and is roaming on the foreign network; connect work laptop to the mobile hot spot. I am just thinking of a short term solution where I was planning to be abroad for two days while working.
Use an emulator to connect to the vpn while leaving your work computer at the office. If the power goes out or you get disconnected you are kinda screwed though. A lot could go wrong, not worth the risk.