Quote: (04-13-2011 12:44 AM)Mystik Wrote:
Quote:Quote:
How can a VPN prevent a direct attack on your computer? Attacks are often directed directly at your known IP address. With a VPN account your home computer IP will not be seen, our VPN server IP will be. Luckily our VPN server is behind some of the best known hardware and engineers in the industry who monitor activity diligently and make sure the VPN server is protected.
http://strongvpn.com/firewall.shtml
Arobin,
This contradicts what you said about VPNs being useless if you want to protect the data on your HDD.
Just a sales trick or is there any truth to this?
I was actually saying VPN won't protect your from
network level attacks (i.e. attacks from other people sharing the WiFi network with you). The quote above is pretty much sales bs, though. Attacks are not "often directed directly at your known IP address." That's a "directed attack." In other words, someone is trying to attack you specifically, which is not common.
It'll offer you marginal protection from malware infecting your PC itself, but I don't see it as anything relevant to real world use. Here are some common ways to get infected:
-You visit a web site that an attacker controls (could be a legit site he hacked or you clicked a bad link and got to an evil site) and the web site exploits a vulnerability in your browser and uses it to take over your machine. VPN doesn't help you here because they're hiding your IP from the web site, but they're still forwarding you the traffic that takes over your machine.
-You download a file that's either malware entirely (e.g. Britney_Spears_Threesome_Video.avi.exe) or is a legitimate program that contains a trojan (e.g. you download a pirated version of MS Office that installs correctly, but also installs malware surreptitiously). VPN won't help you here for the same reason as visiting a malicious web site.
-Attackers use tools called "port scanners" to scan computers at random by guessing their IP addresses and checking if the machine behind the IP has any vulnerabilities. Even with a VPN, you still have an IP address and you're just as vulnerable to having an attacker guess it. The VPN
will protect you if someone is collecting IPs from a web site or something that you visit and then scanning those machines for vulnerabilities, but that's not very common (it's much faster and easier to just search at random). VPN will offer you protection if someone is trying to attack you specifically (e.g. trying to find your IP from your web footprints) but if someone's targeting you specifically, you're in big trouble.
You'll notice that none of these have anything to do with travel. In all of these examples, the attacker is at a random location on the Internet. The threat you were originally talking about was public WiFi, meaning the attacker is on the same network as you. VPN isn't hiding your IP in this case because the attacker can see your communication with the access point / router. So an attacker can still port scan your machine and look for vulnerabilities, plus he has an advantage because he's on your network and behind your firewall, which gives him more to work with. The only way here I can see VPN helping you is if the attacker wanted to infect you by tampering with your web traffic to inject malware, but this seems pretty impractical for the attacker and therefore unlikely. If an attacker is trying to take over your machine or access your files over public WiFi, it'll likely be through attack vectors that VPN can't protect.
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