The latest warning for iPhone and Android users should see millions of apps deleted from phones and millions more not installed in the first place. The nature of this warning isn’t new—but this time it comes directly from the U.S. government. Hopefully this means users will take it more seriously this time.
While the security vulnerabilities with SMS and RCS texting have taken center stage in this month’s FBI and CISA warnings, the agencies have also told users to make sure they keep the firmware on their phones updates at all times and to make use of safe browsing, DNS masking and password managers when available.
The latest warning hasn’t made headlines yet, but it constitutes as big a security breach as sending open text messages over cellular networks. “Do not use your own virtual network that is not public,” warns the US government’s cyber defense agency. “Personal VPNs simply transfer the residual threat from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, expanding the attack surface. “
This is not news. Time and time again, cybersecurity experts have warned the same thing. Last month, Kaspersky warned that the number of harmful free VPN installations is booming, “increasing 2. 5 times in the second quarter globally. ” These applications were malware or systems potentially used by malicious actors. This increase, Kaspersky warns, continued in the last quarter.
And in June, specialist websites Top10VPN just tested the “100 most popular free Android VPN apps in the Google Play Store… with 2.5 billon worldwide installs between them,” and found the following issues:
As CISA itself says, “many free and advertising VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. ” Although their recommendation is to use these types of apps unless “your organization wants a VPN consumer to access your data,” I wouldn’t go that far.
VPNs are easy to use and essential in certain situations, such as public Wi-Fi in absolutely open or unreliable environments, especially abroad, or when you need to hide your location from sites you call over or anyone tracking internet traffic.
It’s only through the use of VPNs that users behind digital curtains in places like Russia, China and Iran can access overseas websites and comms platforms. This is why Apple removing VPNs from its Russian App Store triggered such headlines.
I’ll repeat my golden VPN rules here and I highly recommend you stick to them:
“There is a growing demand for VPN applications,” Kaspersky says. Users tend to believe that if they locate a VPN app in an official store, such as Google Play, it is safe and can be used to get content that was not available to them in the first place. And they think it’s even better if this VPN service is free!However, this ends up being a trap, as evidenced by recent cases and statistics showing a backlog of encounters with malicious VPN apps.
Now the US government has added its own warning: Hopefully, users will be encouraged to avoid these risks regardless. These free or low-rent apps generate a large number of installs. This will have to stop now.
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