Just a hypothetical question, not that I plan on doing anything. If I do something online that would put me away for a long, long time if the authorities so much as sniffed it, will using a paid logless VPN protect me from being found? How can I be sure that the VPN company isn’t actually keeping logs that they would turn over if ordered to by a court of law?
People who engage in criminal/illegal activity on the internet often times use very complicated setups wherein a VPN is just a small part of their apparatus. As a matter of fact, I believe that most people use burner machines, personally configured and maintained VPNs, and multi-layered encryptions.
Most people use VPNs to get around issues concerning access to parts of the internet. I use a VPN for that reason and so that websites have a harder time tracking me and learning about me just based off of where I chose to explore. If you’re just using a VPN, you should do so assuming that your ISP can’t see and that the government or a foreign government that may share data with your government, can.
tl;dr: No, a VPN will not protect you if you hypothetically speaking, wanted to engage in something criminally illegal.
I’d suggest using Tor on top of the logless VPN. That way it’ll be very hard to track your identity.
The real answer is … it depends.
Are you going to download movies? … yes …
Are you going to hack the CIA? … hell… to the … fuck… no.
Not to be mean, but you sound like you don’t know enough 5o be doing anything illegal online.
But if your going to do it. Use a tails boot CD, a VPN configured on your router or just not on any internet connection with your name attached.
And a common mistake noobs make. Dont sign into anything like your email or Facebook while doing whatever it is you may be doing.
Most people have a laptop specifically configured for that purpose and only ever use it for that purpose.
No, a VPN is like wearing a balaclava to a bank robbery, it may stop the cameras getting a picture of your face, but that’s only one of many ways used to catch a robber.
It comes down to cost/benefit, VPNs are mostly useful for keeping the corporates from tracking you. For “trivial crime” (bit torrenting movies etc) it’s enough cover because there are so many doing it and the crime isn’t viewed terribly seriously by most.
If you’re going to behave illegally then you’ll want to be doing “proper” opsec (opsec is operational security and no I’m not going to explain what that entails).
Anything above pirating you need to do a lot more stuff than a VPN
Illegal or not, if someone has the right people after them, I don’t think it’s gonna matter what encryption, VPN, Tor, Tails, Windows 95, or whatever they use. They will get you.
i would add to all the advice here about using a virtual machine.
if i was going to commit an online crime, i would create a vm,
use it to do the deed, then destroy the vm image file.
best to keep a vm file on a flash drive you can secure delete,
so there’s no recoverable trace of it on your regular pc.
Something else to keep in mind (I learned About this recently) even if you’re using a VPN, if you don’t change your DNS, they can still track you through that. It’s not very hard to change your dns server.
Hmm. I think the level of illegality requires different security measures. What sort of crimes do you have in mind?
Burner machines are a good idea. Switch locations too after a few hours.
Although, most of the good vpn say they do not keep logs, but i think you are never sure of this. Who is going to check it.
There unfortunately is no way around the trust and hope factor for all paid/free VPN’s. The only way around that is to create your own VPN. That’s assuming of course that you can trust yourself.
I thought this for a long time too until someone here suggested that might be a bad idea. His/her reasoning was that anyone monitoring a tor node might see a known VPN providers IP address stick out more so than others and be more scrutinizing of the information. I still think it’s a good idea but it’s something to keep in mind.
And a common mistake noobs make. Dont sign into anything like your email or Facebook while doing whatever it is you may be doing.
Isn’t that what brought down Dread Pirate Roberts?
Windows 95 really be secure tho. Fuck Tor/Tails, this is best OpSec confirmed
In a nutshell how do you create your own VPN?
True but there’s no real way to know if they’re logging your endpoint IP address.
Head over here: Set Up Your Own VPN, Without the Expensive Software and it will show you how to create one.