Will having a VPN protect me from Identity Theft?
On the plus side there are a number of steps that we all can take to help combat the threat of identity theft and the best VPN providers offer many of these combined with their Virtual Private Network service.
By using a Man-in-the-Middle Attack, known simply as a MITM, a scammer can trick us into given our most important information whilst we sit on a train, enjoy a coffee or wait for a plane at the airport.
That is because more and more shopping centres, public transport, airports, coffee shops, stadiums and elsewhere are offering free WI-FI as a way to get you to visit their establishment or use their service.
Whilst on the face of it that is a great service for all of us to enjoy, it does leave us open to a relatively simply breach of our security as scammers can trick these public networks into thinking that they are a middleman between your device and network.
Therefore anything you input, is past to the scammer first and that can include your emails, you passwords, your social media account details and even your bank details.
Worse of all, if you use the same public hotspot on a regular occasion, such as on your daily commute, your device will likely automatically log you in and it could be sharing your info whilst you are searching for a seat.
Another method of using public WI-FI against us is to set up similar sounding networks to trick us into login on to a network set up by a scammer.
For example, if you go to a coffee shop and they offer free Wi-Fi, you will normally have to log into a network. If that network is called coffeeshop1, for example, all a scammer has to do is set up their own network available in that location called coffeeshop2 and wait for somebody to connect to the wrong one.
They can now see and access everything you do and with many public hotspots needing you to input your name and email address, they are well on their way to grabbing your identity before you have even visited a website.
Of course if you do your online banking, they have access to that. If you visit your social media, they have access to that and if you read your emails, they have access to them and just think about all of the information they can gather about your life from those 3 interactions alone.
Now as we said a VPN cannot guarantee that a scammer will not find their way to your information but what it does do, and does well, is adds another barrier between the information you input and the scammer.
As soon as you have a VPN all of your information is now encrypted before going out onto a network and onto the internet so whilst the scammer may still see the data flow, they will not be able to read it.
Perhaps the best way to look at it is, if you were a scammer and somebody was sending encrypted data would you spend incredible amounts of time and effort in the minute hope of cracking it, or wait for your next victim to come along without a VPN?
