- Jan 8, 2011
- 22,361
Here's a Round 2 for these Free VPN apps that everyone uses.
"These tales concerning the lack of security of mobile VPNs have caught the attention of researchers, and an Australian report entitled ‘An Analysis of the Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps’ looked at precisely this issue in great depth. After a comprehensive analysis of 238 VPN apps available on the Google Play store, the researchers made several worrying conclusions:
"These tales concerning the lack of security of mobile VPNs have caught the attention of researchers, and an Australian report entitled ‘An Analysis of the Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps’ looked at precisely this issue in great depth. After a comprehensive analysis of 238 VPN apps available on the Google Play store, the researchers made several worrying conclusions:
- 38% of the apps contained malware
- 75% used third-party tracking libraries
- 82% requested permission for access to resources on the smartphone including email and text messages
- 18% did not disclose who is hosting the server at the end of the VPN tunnel
- 16% did not use servers to forward traffic, but rather forwarded data through users in a peer-to-peer fashion
- 18% of the VPN tunnels created did not use any encryption (defeating the entire point of a VPN)