NordVPN announced that one of its servers was breached in March 2018, exposing habits browsing of customers who used the VPN service to not expose their personal data.
NordVPN reports that the hacked server is located in Finland and does not contain archives activity logs, usernames or passwords. However, an attacker could see users' internet activity during a connection, although the company said the content of the websites would likely be encrypted.
In the last few years NordVPN has been showing up a lot on the internet, due to a very aggressive advertising campaign. You will often see ads and posts about NordVPN. They all claim to be a super duper safe company, even though we all know it isn't better safety online.
The company promotes its product as a very reliable way to keep your online life private, but server breaches may pose new potential customers.
Of course the company is trying to downplay the fact. Tom Okman, a company executive, told TheVerge:
Attackers could only have compromised this server to track traffic and see which web pages they were browsing and not the content, only the webpage - for a limited time, and only in this isolated area.
Okman said that NordVPN usually changes the server that each user logs on to every five minutes, but users can choose the country to which they connect. This means that users would have been affected for minimal periods of time.
Details of the breach began circulating over the weekend from researchers security. In one Publication on the company's blog this morning, NordVPN said it had been aware of the breach for "a few months", but did not immediately disclose the problem because it wanted to control other systems…
According to the company, the violation was limited to a single server.
The server was vulnerable between January 31 January 2018 and March 20 2018, but NordVPN believes it was breached only once, in March.
The attack did not affect any other data centers, the company said, and that it stopped cooperating with the company that provided them with that server.
Can a breach be as painless as the company describes?
Okman says the company does not believe that information has been leaked, and that NordVPN will inform its customers of the email infringement, something it should have done months ago.
"I wouldn't call this a hack", Said Okman. "It's an isolated security breach - hack is a very powerful word in this case. "
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