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PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

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Re: PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

#71
post #14

Disappointed. I've been with PIA for a few years now and I always recommended them and loved their support. I just cancelled my annual subscription which was due to expire in 100 days. Vote with your wallet. Any recommendations for a new VPN provider?

I recommend AirVPN. They're very reliable and run by activist hackers. I've heard good things about Mullvad too.

Yes. Along with IVPN and Mullvad.

They're among the oldest VPN services. Not as old as Cryptohippie, but almost.

Re: PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

#72
post #14

Disappointed. I've been with PIA for a few years now and I always recommended them and loved their support. I just cancelled my annual subscription which was due to expire in 100 days. Vote with your wallet. Any recommendations for a new VPN provider?

Me too. I cancelled my subscription about a week ago when I first heard of it (and I explained why on their cancellation form). I'm looking at Mullvad and NordVPN. I know Nord had a MITM attack on a Finnish datacenter a few months ago and didn't immediately notify affected users. I'm having trouble understanding what it says about Nord's culture and likely behavior in the future. On a technical level, it's pretty bad…

NordVPN apparently using residential proxies is pretty iffy.

Re: PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

#74
post #14

Disappointed. I've been with PIA for a few years now and I always recommended them and loved their support. I just cancelled my annual subscription which was due to expire in 100 days. Vote with your wallet. Any recommendations for a new VPN provider?

Me too. I cancelled my subscription about a week ago when I first heard of it (and I explained why on their cancellation form). I'm looking at Mullvad and NordVPN. I know Nord had a MITM attack on a Finnish datacenter a few months ago and didn't immediately notify affected users. I'm having trouble understanding what it says about Nord's culture and likely behavior in the future. On a technical level, it's pretty bad…

You may want to read the comments and article linked here before thinking about NordVPN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692

They are seemingly sketchily using "residential proxies" at least for Disney+. These proxies seem to be coming from their customers, or customers of a company NordVPN is closely tied to - likely without their knowledge.

Re: PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

#76
post #55
post #3

Former PIA user who recently just moved to Mullvad [1]. Very transparent about their operations and they don't require any information from you to open an account. You can even mail them cash or pay with cryptocurrency to avoid having your real identity financially linked to your subscription. [1] https://mullvad.net/en/

Seeing Mullvad being hyped all over since the NordVPN disaster, I predict they will be next.

Next to be what? Hacked? Taken over? Become evil?

Re: PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

#77

Whether this is true or not isn’t really the point. The fact that it it’s even possible is a huge red flag for my use case / threat model. It’s relatively easy, not to mention cheap (less than $10 per month) to spin up a streisand (0) instance and protect myself that way. As long as I keep my traffic encrypted, I can keep most / all of the vultures away that I’m concerned about. Happy to walk anyone through it. Takes…

These approaches work (and I use one myself in addition to a group VPN) but remember, if you roll your own, you lose any/all plausible deniability for sure.

Good point, thank you. Because of my use case, this isn’t an issue. But I understand we all have different models and should act accordingly.

Re: PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

#78
post #61
post #14

Disappointed. I've been with PIA for a few years now and I always recommended them and loved their support. I just cancelled my annual subscription which was due to expire in 100 days. Vote with your wallet. Any recommendations for a new VPN provider?

Get a VPS and run a VPN client to it and/or run Tor. VPN providers suffer adverse selection, catering to powerless customers who don't have their own data centers, but have something to hide. And they know who you are, which Tor exit nodes don't. That makes them juicy targets for spies, not all of whose compromises will be as obvious as a financial takeover.

Then you need to trust the VPS provider.

Also, using a private VPN proxy, you're the only user. So there's even less anonymity than using a VPN service.

The safest bet is arguably Tor. Although the connection to the US government is troubling. And then there's the issue that many sites block Tor users with difficult or impossible CAPTCHAs.

Using nested VPN chains is a reasonable compromise. It's much faster than Tor, and you don't need to trust any one VPN provider.

Re: PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

#79
post #14

Disappointed. I've been with PIA for a few years now and I always recommended them and loved their support. I just cancelled my annual subscription which was due to expire in 100 days. Vote with your wallet. Any recommendations for a new VPN provider?

Thanks for the update, immediately did the same.

Re: PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

#80
post #25

This could do without the clickbait title. "former Israeli spy" is obviously trying to make you think of something nefarious, even though there are no details besides where they worked. I was in an intel unit when I was in the military, and there's a lot of general IT people, managers, etc. It's deliberately deceptive to label anyone who has ever worked at an intel agency as a "spy".

His LinkedIn indicates that he was a developer in the unit that created the Student Virus... Spy has a broad definition but it probably fits for a SigInt developer in the Israeli military.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200

Stuxnet was created by the NSA in a joint operation with 8200. And yes there are 50,000 ex-8200 alumni, so calling all of them spies is kind of absurd
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