What is a VPN and who needs it

Using a VPN is one of the easiest ways to protect yourself online. For example, journalists use VPNs for secure communication, and even those who don’t want Google and Amazon to be constantly informed of their whereabouts enjoy VPN connections. But be careful: encrypted connections do not provide additional protection against viruses and Trojans.

What is a VPN?

VPN stands for “Virtual Private Network”, which means “Virtual Private Network”. The so-called VPN services also allow you to establish secure connections across the network and encrypt your data traffic. Users can imagine a tunnel to a provider where all the data flows in. This makes it difficult for third parties to access this data or follow users’ path on the Internet.

Who needs a VPN connection?

Anyone on the Internet with a VPN connection will hide their real location and receive a different IP address than their real one. For example, users can pretend to be from another country through a VPN. If you want to make a call to the website, everything goes through the service used, which forwards the data to the user. The visited page does not see its IP address, but the address of the provider’s server.

Secure connection is also possible: VPN connections are encrypted and simply invisible. For example, it can be useful in countries where talking to journalists and giving them information is unwelcome.

VPN services also provide security for users who want to connect to a public WLAN. One method that criminals use is to obtain data from users who are using WLANs.

Some companies also use VPNs. For example, employees must be enabled when traveling from the home office or to access sensitive company data.

How do I use a VPN?

Users connect to the VPN with the help of VPN clients, i.e. software. There are different technical possibilities: download the client‌ or use browser-based solutions. Many services offer subscription samples, which usually cost a few euros per month. However, there are also free offers that often have restrictions, including limited data volume or ads.

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