VPNMentor Blog

Related Searches for VPNs spike in Texas after Pornhub pulls out of the state (3 points, 10 months ago, no comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39748715 Searches for VPN Soar in Utah Amidst Pornhub Blockage (217 points, 2 years ago, 289 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35807408 The spike was detected/reported by one site only (https://www.vpnmentor.com/news/vpn-demand-surge-florida/). Nice SEO for them. Note vpnMentor is pretty obscure, the NYT/Wirecutter didn't include it in a recent roundup [The Best VPN Service (2024)](https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-vpn-service/)

VPNmentor, a VPN review site, was acquired by Kape "Technologies" for 150M. PrivateInternetAccess, a major VPN service was acquired by the same company for 95M. A VPN review site is worth more than most VPN services it promotes due to insane $CPA they pay to these types of sites, that masquerade as "security exports" while in reality ran by marketing people. Look at their staff: https://www.vpnmentor.com/about-us/ Every "favorite" VPN is a property they own, except for the sole NordVPN guy.

Even in China I think you can get around it or at least you could when I was last there although there was a little more hassle than in other countries. See https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/best-free-vpns-china/ for example.

Someone's recommended AzireVPN to me as a WireGuard-friendly VPN a few years ago and I've been using it without any issues since. I wouldn't use any of the big guys tbh, not going to contribute to the millions they spend on advertising. Here's a random review https://www.vpnmentor.com/reviews/azirevpn/

Upstream post: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-biostar2-leak/ Quote : Our team was able to access over 27.8 million records, a total of 23 gigabytes of data, which included the following information: - Access to client admin panels, dashboards, back end controls, and permissions - Fingerprint data - Facial recognition information and images of users - Unencrypted usernames, passwords, and user IDs - Records of entry and exit to secure areas - Employee records including start dates - Employee security levels and clearances - Personal details, including employee home address and emails - Businesses’ employee structures and hierarchies - Mobile device and OS information One of the more surprising aspects of this leak was how unsecured the account passwords we accessed were. Plenty of accounts had ridiculously simple passwords, like “Password” and “abcd1234”. It’s difficult to imagine that people still don’t realize how easy this makes it for a hacker to access their account.

People should take this list with a serious health warning. Firstly, a lot of this is just 'internet sleuth'ing and innuendo. Plenty of companies want to operate multiple services to be able to use different marketing and differentiation strategies. Secondly, the fact that the site is funded by affiliate links to a coupole of the big VPN services should really ring alarm bells. I trust we all learned from the Mattress review debacles? [1] Thirdly, the companies who are funding this site through affiliate links, despite not being investigated in this article are arguably more worth of some serious suspicion. For example: NordVPN, one of their "Top VPN providers" is run by the same guy who runs a Lithuanian data harvesting company[2], but don't worry, lots of websites who make money from affiliate links to NordVPN (Sign up Now! 75% off when you use the code "SCAM" at checkout!) Now, maybe I'm being cynical - but I suspect if NordVPN weren't lining the pockets of all these referral websites their reviews of NordVPN would involve a lot more of the faux concern they show about other VPN companies in this hit piece, rather than the credulous write-ups about how it's totally not a problem that this shifty Panamanian company has suspicious links to data harvesters. [1]:https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsui… [2]:https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/is-nordvpn-operated-by-tesonet/

Thanks, the last fetched page on archive.org is from 2025-01-26 [1], removed after this date and before 2025-02-13. 155,477 users at the moment, 1 star reviews were mostly about not working. It's interesting that the developers didn't care to remove the button directing to the ff add-on page at least several months after the removal. Maybe was some kind of PR compromise, they probably thought that listing it with linking to a broken page was better than not listing at all. A review page [2] mentions that this add-on is a peer-to-peer vpn, not having its own dedicated servers that already makes it suspicious. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250126133131/https://addons.mozilla.org/… [2] https://www.vpnmentor.com/reviews/urban-vpn/

Canada has relatively lenient copyright laws/enforcement. It's likely that Google sees no legal need to honor DMCA-style takedown notices in Canada. Here's a guide to the legal status of torrents here with broad categories, from most lenient to most strict (caution VPN spam): https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/torrents-illegal-update-country/ Interesting to note that downloading copyrighted content for personal use is explicitly legal (not just overlooked) in Spain, Switzerland, and Poland.

Unless you have first-hand knowledge of the devices they used, you can’t assume sensible developers. For example, HTC shipped this mess: https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/10/9126027/htc-fingerprint-scanner-vul… Similarly, a vendor of facility access control systems left fingerprint scans in an exposed ElasticSearch instance: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-biostar2-leak/

1. The original write-up can be found here: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-facebook-scam/ 2. Facebook was not breached in the sense that is normally meant by that term. 3. You may assume that the "bitcoin scam" is untraceable and the scammers will get away because it used cryptocurrency. Not the case. They were spamming links to "bitcoin trading" platforms which accept deposits using credit cards and which are a modern reincarnation of "forex trading" scam platforms. The industry is mostly based out of Israel and uses the normal banking system and even accepts credit cards, as I mentioned. The only reason the criminals won't get caught is that no government will prioritize this.

Actual source: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-truedialog-leak/ Saved you a click

Non-techcrunch link https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-truedialog-leak/?=truedialog-exp…

>It's unknown if anyone has taken advantage of the vulnerability (yet) and, as of July 1, the database was still accessible with no password protection. And this article had been published today... The database had been closed a day later on July 2. Here the the original report instead of a Forbes article: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-orvibo-leak/

Further details here: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-orvibo-leak/ Which was posted a few days ago.

Likely explanation for this type of discovery would be either internet wide scans of known services or happening across these servers while reverse-engineering an app / protocol related to the specific service. The former seems to be the case here, as the authors refer to some of their "web-mapping" efforts in the last paragraph and have previously published similar findings [1, 2] they discovered through the same process. You can get starting points for probing into this as a service from places like [3] if you don't want to perform the scan on your own infrastructure - although the tools for this became insanely accessible over the last few years (at least for IPv4 coverage). [1] https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-millions-homes-exposed/ [2] https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-theta360-leak/ [3] https://www.shodan.io/

China has disallowed their citizens from using Google, Netflix, Instagram, but everyone's up in arms over Trump stopping the US from doing business with Huawei. I really don't understand this. https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/the-complete-list-of-blocked-websites-i…

Looks like the source article is here: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/vpn-leaks-found-3-major-vpns-3-tested/ NB: I suspect most privacy VPN products suffer from this since they don't really do any customer data filtering at all.

I just tried the following and they all had no IP or my VPN ip: - https://www.perfect-privacy.com/webrtc-leaktest/ - https://browserleaks.com/webrtc - http://whatismyipaddress.com/webrtc-test - https://zpn.im/webrtc - https://www.vpnmentor.com/tools/ip-leak-test-vpns-tor/