Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) πŸ˜‡

Protect your privacy

Martin Thoma
3 min readAug 15, 2024
Photo by Privecstasy on Unsplash

A Virtual Private Network (short: VPN) is a mechanism that which allows you to remotely connect your computer to a private network over a public channel such as the internet. The VPN routes your traffic over the VPN provider. This means you don’t access the internet directly anymore, but your VPN provider does it for you.

It’s about securing network traffic.

An interesting side-effect is that the websites you’re using now don’t see your IP address. They see the IP address of the VPN server. This means you can work around content area restrictions, e.g. when you’re on vacation abroad and still want to use your Netflix account to watch the same series.

What is a VPN good for?

  • Bypass geographic restrictions, e.g. Netflix
  • Privacy: Hide your IP address. Just be aware that there are other ways to track you, e.g. cookies or browser fingerprinting. It also helps to hide which websites you’re using from the local wifi operator. If privacy is your main concern, then you want to look for a no-logs policy VPN provider.
  • Personalized Pricing: If you think you get a different price because of the location you’re from, then a VPN might help. I’m just not sure if that is really the case. Please leave a comment if you have first-hand experience with that.
  • Security in insecure Wifi: A VPN protects you from DNS Hijacking.

See also

What’s next?

In this series about application security (AppSec) we already explained some of the techniques of the attackers 😈 and also the techniques of the defenders πŸ˜‡:

Let me know if you are interested in more articles around AppSec / InfoSec!

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Martin Thoma
Martin Thoma

Written by Martin Thoma

I’m a Software Engineer with over 10 years of Python experience (Backend/ML/AI). Support me via https://martinthoma.medium.com/membership

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