VPNs are so insecure you might as well wear a KICK ME sign

[steve2470]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/30/worlds_best_vpns_fall_flat_in_security_tests/

(yes the actual headline from the website)

A team of five researchers from universities in London and Rome have identified that 14 of the top commercial virtual private networks in the world leak IP data.

Vasile C. Perta, Marco V. Barbera, and Alessandro Mei of Sapienza University of Rome, together with Gareth Tyson, and Hamed Haddadi of the Queen Mary University of London say vendor promises of user privacy and security are often lies that put users at risk.

"Despite being a known issue, our experimental study reveals that the majority of VPN services suffer from IPv6 traffic leakage," the authors wrote in the paper A Glance through the VPN Looking Glass: IPv6 Leakage and DNS Hijacking in Commercial VPN clients [PDF].

"Our findings confirm the criticality of the current situation: many of these [14] providers leak all, or a critical part of the user traffic in mildly adversarial environments.

more at link