![]() ![]() ![]() If this was not concerning enough, what is even scarier is that users are not aware of the security risk with this paper going on to point out that “Only less than 1% of the negative reviews relate to security and privacy concerns,” when going through reviews of these VPN’s on the Google Play store, suggesting that the vast majority of users are quite oblivious that they are putting themselves at such high risk. With researchers studying 283 VPN’s, it was found that 38% of them contain some type of malware, including adware, trojan, After all, a VPN service is in a unique position to inspect a user’s traffic. Published in the Proceedings of the 2016 Internet Measurement Conference, the article “An Analysis of the Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps (opens in new tab) ” brings up some serious issues. However, when the issue of free VPN’s, specifically for the Android platform has been studied, the results are more than concerning. Now experience with one lousy VPN should not taint all free VPN’s. And yet, despite these serious issues, Hola Free VPN soldiers on for the unsuspecting, claiming over 184 million users. On top of that, HolaVPN users could be incorporated by cybercriminals into a botnet attack. In fact, subsequent research by security firm Trend Micro showed that not only were Hola users being used for Hola VPN nodes, but sneakily, were simultaneously being used as nodes for a commercial VPN, Luminati. Hola claims that this practice keeps the cost down, but this immediately raises the concern that another Hola user’s illegal activity could be sharing your IP Address and bandwidth. ![]() Rather than building out a network of servers to host the service, Hola created a “peer to peer” VPN, with each user potentially acting as a node, with other users traffic going through your smartphone, although Hola reassured users “The amount of traffic that Hola passes through a peer on its network per day on average is less than a 20 second YouTube clip,” estimated to be about 5 MB’s. Hola Free VPN is just one of many free VPNs that has gained public attention recently for being unsafe (Image Credit: Hola) (Image credit: Image Credit: Hola) Say goodbye to HolaĪ good example of this is the Hola Free VPN.
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