We felt that they worked with our research team in a fast and serious manner and that they care for their users. “The fast response of Hotspot Shield is something we think is worth commending. VPN Mentor’s IP address was revealed when they tested it on HotSpot Shield. Hotspot Shield was quick to respond to VPN Mentor regarding the vulnerabilities and patched all vulnerabilities professionally and timely protecting millions of its users from what could be a serious threat if exploited. The second and third vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-7878 & CVE-2018-7880) leaked IP and DNS addresses which as discussed above poses a privacy threat to users since hackers can track user location and the ISP. The first vulnerability (CVE-2018-7879) allowed remote attackers to cause a reload of the affected system or to remotely execute code. HotSpot Shield VPN vulnerabilitiesĪccording to the findings, AnchorFree’s HotSpot Shield was filled with three vulnerabilities. Here it must be noted that the vulnerabilities exist in the Chrome browser plugins for all three VPNs and not in the desktop or smartphone apps. Out of three hackers, one has decided to keep their identity hidden while one going by the online handle of File Descriptor while the other Paulos Yibelo. 3 hackers exposed vulnerabilities in 3 top VPN vendorsĪccording to VPN Mentor’s blog post, in order to find vulnerabilities in Hotspot Shield, PureVPN, and Zenmate VPN Mentor hired three ethical hackers who after testing concluded all three VPN have been leaking IP address of the user, even when a VPN is in use posing a massive privacy threat.

The purpose of using a VPN depends on the situation but mostly people opt-in for VPNs to fight online censorship by accessing websites that are blocked by their ISPs while some chose to use VPN for anonymity and better privacy.īut what happens when the VPN you thought was protecting your privacy was actually posing a threat to it? You can be under government surveillance or malicious organizations, hackers can track your IP address and identify your ISP or on a business level, it can allow attackers to carry distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. According to VPN Mentor, a privacy advocate firm which reviews virtual private networks (VPN), after in-depth research, it has been discovered that three VPN service providers with millions of customers worldwide are leaking sensitive data such as users’ IP addresses – These VPNs include Hotspot Shield, PureVPN, and Zenmate.

Purevpn app screenshots 2018