Internet privacy is a priority for businesses and private citizens alike. Personal data is shared online every day, making the internet a prime target for cyber criminals. Mass hacking scandals make headlines throughout the year, and the public may wonder what they can do to make themselves less vulnerable to hackers.
Even though certain safety measures are built into the internet (i.e., secured shopping sites), internet users are never completely protected from hackers. However, a virtual private network, or VPN, may help alleviate some safety concerns.
Perhaps you have heard of a VPN used at your place of business but never considered one for personal use. VPNs can limit tracking, monitoring, identification, as well as many other safety concerns when logged online.
According to the technology information site Mashable, an internet protocol, or IP, address serves in a similar fashion to your home address. These numbers correspond to your location, and identify your computer (or router) on the internet. Any device that accesses the internet is assigned a standard IP address. What a person does online, and where he or she does it from, can be tracked using an IP address.
With a VPN, you pay a small monthly charge for a service account. The VPN will take the internet connection and make it more secure by lending you a temporary (virtual) IP address that hides your true IP address from every website or email with which you connect. By hiding the actual IP address, this makes internet users anonymous and browsing more secure, states the computer resource What Is My IP Address. When using a VPN, all interaction between a website and a visitor will be exclusive without the ability for any third party to see activity or cull information later on.
VPNs work by encrypting your activity through a tunnel that’s created between you and the VPN’s server. Data is broken down into packets, encoded, and then decrypted by the VPN server through the Advanced Encryption Standard, according to Cisco.
VPNs can be handy for security, but also because certain online companies and networks may restrict someone’s access to a website based on where the user is located — which is ascertained through their IP address. Furthermore, hackers can tap into networks and sometimes take over systems and devices simply through an IP address or non-encrypted data. VPNs are an added measure to thwart these efforts.
April 30, 2019
