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NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

torguard.net

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Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#61

Post by pnutjam »

penagwin wrote: post #59
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I told you that a lot of these "VPN providers" were shell companies built to explicitly facilitate access and tools for crime / espionage with the premise of having users there as cover.

Oh trust me, I'm well aware of "VPN providers". Just checkout luminati.io . See how they offer an SDK so "You can offer the user a choice between advertisements or a bit of background data usage"? I asked, and they are only interested in partners with 100k active users a month. Right, like a legitimate company with that many users is going to use luminati. Or oxylabs.io who I think owns luminati? I'm also aware that…

Stick with the big players, PIA, airvpn. I trust those two.

Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#62

Post by SturmUndDrang »

cyberpunk wrote: post #10

Had a quick skim; it seems at a glance like someone from TorGuard badmouthed NordVPN on a youtube comment ( sigh ), so NordVPN apparently in response threatened to disclose "trade secret information obtained by NordVPN regarding TorGuard’s systems" it obtained via a hosting provider TorGuard used which is owned by the NordVPN people. This apparently involved some pretty sketchy stuff like sending people to the house…

> What kind of information could you gleam as the owner of a 'service provider' for such a use?

They could find internal targets for DDOS to disrupt the competing VPN service so users get kicked off or can't login. If you can't use what you paid for most would ask to cancel.

Ddos attacks like this occur in any competitive space, but what bothers me here is the hosting company Collective seven appears to have betrayed a client's trust for competitive gain.

With such dishonest practices by hosting providers these days it makes me wonder what is really going on.

Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#63

Post by pnutjam »

rocky1138 wrote: post #60
jimbokun wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone recommend another VPN provider, than Nord or Torguard? Main use case is for using public WiFi when travelling.

Private Internet Access. Besides providing great service, they sponsor a lot of free and open source software and services, like Freenode IRC.

I've used PIA for years. The only other one that I've used is Air VPN. They seem pretty legit.

Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#65

Post by preinheimer »

penagwin wrote: post #59
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I told you that a lot of these "VPN providers" were shell companies built to explicitly facilitate access and tools for crime / espionage with the premise of having users there as cover.

Oh trust me, I'm well aware of "VPN providers". Just checkout luminati.io . See how they offer an SDK so "You can offer the user a choice between advertisements or a bit of background data usage"? I asked, and they are only interested in partners with 100k active users a month. Right, like a legitimate company with that many users is going to use luminati. Or oxylabs.io who I think owns luminati? I'm also aware that…

More on how luminati and other "residential ip" providers work here: https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-...

Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#66

Post by penagwin »

pnutjam wrote: post #61
penagwin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh trust me, I'm well aware of "VPN providers". Just checkout luminati.io . See how they offer an SDK so "You can offer the user a choice between advertisements or a bit of background data usage"? I asked, and they are only interested in partners with 100k active users a month. Right, like a legitimate company with that many users is going to use luminati. Or oxylabs.io who I think owns luminati? I'm also aware that…

Stick with the big players, PIA, airvpn. I trust those two.

At the end of the day they're mostly just fancy OpenVPN profiles. The entire space is fishy AF IMO.

I'm thankful that linustechtips seems to evaluate their VPN sponsors at least. I believe they dropped tunnelbear in favor of PIA because of similar concerns.

Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#67

Post by zelon88 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #20
cyberpunk wrote: post #10

Had a quick skim; it seems at a glance like someone from TorGuard badmouthed NordVPN on a youtube comment ( sigh ), so NordVPN apparently in response threatened to disclose "trade secret information obtained by NordVPN regarding TorGuard’s systems" it obtained via a hosting provider TorGuard used which is owned by the NordVPN people. This apparently involved some pretty sketchy stuff like sending people to the house…

Reading the parent pdf vs Nord's response [0] I'm slightly more inclined to believe Nords version of events here... 0: https://nordvpn.com/blog/torguard-lawsuit/

But how did NordVPN find a vulnerability in their trash-talking competition in the first place? What were they poking at and whey were they poking it?

Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#68

Post by LinuxBender »

penagwin wrote: post #59
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I told you that a lot of these "VPN providers" were shell companies built to explicitly facilitate access and tools for crime / espionage with the premise of having users there as cover.

Oh trust me, I'm well aware of "VPN providers". Just checkout luminati.io . See how they offer an SDK so "You can offer the user a choice between advertisements or a bit of background data usage"? I asked, and they are only interested in partners with 100k active users a month. Right, like a legitimate company with that many users is going to use luminati. Or oxylabs.io who I think owns luminati? I'm also aware that…

+1 on ssh + vps. People will say it isn't as anonymous as the shared vpn's and while that is somewhat true, it is still more than sufficient to remove your home IP from logs. Short of scary letters and warrants to the VPS provider, people won't really know who you are. You can also automate the rebuilding of proxy nodes to get new IP's, as most VPS providers have an API for automated rebuilds.

Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#69

Post by [deleted] »

rasengan wrote: post #31
cyberpunk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the parent pdf vs Nord's response [0] I'm slightly more inclined to believe Nords version of events here... 0: https://nordvpn.com/blog/torguard-lawsuit/

NordVPN is good at spinning stories, but quite frankly they have been caught in too many lies to ever trust again [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18609655

[deleted]

Re: NordVPN sued by Torguard for blackmail [pdf]

#70

Post by xoa »

jimbokun wrote: post #58
kadoban wrote: post #13

NordVPN is by far the shittiest VPN service I have ever used. They billed me twice, two months in a row, and getting them to fix it was like pulling teeth. This is not to mention the hard time I had actually using the service, between random inability to connect and outages. They have ISP-level arrogance, without the lock-in. I have no idea how they're still in business. So I'd be very inclined towards believing this…

Can anyone recommend another VPN provider, than Nord or Torguard? Main use case is for using public WiFi when travelling.

>Main use case is for using public WiFi when travelling

Your own VPN is the correct answer. If you have a fast enough symmetric link at home then just run a small machine there (or your router/sec appliance may support it) or else get a ~$5 VPS from OVH/DigitalOcean/Scaleway/Amazon/Google/MS or whomever you like and run WireGuard on it. Or if you want something more turnkey with IKEv2 support (if you have devices that can't use WG) then check out Algo [1].

But there is likely no need for or reason to use a "VPN provider" if all you're looking to do is shift your virtual entry point to the internet from the edge, and lots of good reasons not to. The only real exception would be if latency is a major concern, you travel very widely and don't want to deal with any extra hassle setting up a solution to move between regions. In that case might be worth keeping an eye on CloudFlare's "Warp" solution [2], which will probably be about as good as it gets in that regard since they've got infrastructure worldwide and will be able to route well.

But I'd definitely suggest checking out running WG (alone of via Algo) yourself. It really is straight forward.

----

1: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/

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