NordVPN announced that one of its servers was hacked in March by 2018, exposing the browsing habits of customers using the VPN service to avoid exposing their personal data.
NordVPN reports that the hacked server is located in Finland and does not contain logs, usernames or passwords. However, the attacker could see the activity of users on Internet during a connection, although according to the company the content of the sites would likely be encrypted.
In recent years, NordVPN has become very popular on the internet due to a very aggressive advertising campaign. You will often see NordVPN ads and publications. Everyone claims that it is a super duper safe company, although we all know there is no online security.
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 have hacked just that server to monitor traffic and see what web pages they browse, not the content, just the web page – for a limited time, and only on that isolated region.
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.
From attack no other data centers were affected, the company says, and that it has stopped it cooperation with the company that gave them the specific 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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