05/28/2024
What is a VPN and why do you need one?
Whether you're in a corporate office, at home, or on the road, a VPN remains one of the best ways to protect your privacy and security on the internet. Here's what else you need to know about this type of tool.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network.
The purpose of a VPN is to provide you with security and privacy as you communicate over the internet.
Here's the problem with the internet: it's inherently insecure. When the internet was first designed, the priority was to be able to send packets (chunks of data) as reliably as possible. Networking across the country and the world was relatively new, and nodes often went down. Most of the internet's core protocols (communication methods) were designed to route around failure, rather than secure data.
The applications you're accustomed to using, such as email, web, messaging, and Facebook, are all built on top of that Internet Protocol (IP) core. While some standards have developed, not all internet apps are secure. Many still send their information without any security or privacy protection whatsoever.
This leaves any internet user vulnerable to criminals who might steal your banking or credit card information, governments who might want to eavesdrop on their citizens, and other internet users who might want to spy on you for a whole range of nefarious reasons.
A VPN creates a private tunnel over the open internet. The idea is that everything you send is encapsulated in this private communications channel and encrypted so -- even if your packets are intercepted -- they can't be deciphered. VPNs are powerful and important tools to protect you and your data, but they have limitations.
