With so many VPN applications becoming increasingly available on Google Playstore and Apple App store, many users who make use of these applications have firm belief in the ability of the VPN service providers to protect their online privacy by making sure that communications between them and the VPN server is hidden to the rest of the world. With this assurance, users can carry on with online activities, having unhindered access to services hitherto unavailable to them. Because of this, diverse subscribers- the good, the bad, and the ugly- have all jumped on the privileges that VPN provides. The question then is how far can VPN protect a user from law enforcement agents?

VPN is short for Virtual Private Network. It is a service that allows remotes users access to an internal network by assigning them IP addresses from the internal network and ensuring that communications between the users and the VPN server remain encrypted. By dialing into a VPN server in US, a user from China, gets assigned an IP address registered to a company in US, making all services available to US internet users available to such user. Many users have been able to use this to circumvent Netflix regional restrictions and have access to Netflix contents originally not available in their region. Other users from countries where social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and the rest are restricted have also resorted to the use of VPN to have access to these services.

Since everyone on the internet only sees your VPN provider’s assigned public IP and believes your internet traffics originate from the US when you are actually in China, does it mean when cyber attacks are launched using VPN, the user can not be fished out by law enforcement agents? There are two instances we will be looking into: a user in China who hides behind VPN to access services that have been shut down by the Chinese government and a user in Kenya who subscribes to to a VPN provider in the US and uses the service to launch an attack on a server in Malaysia.

Denying users in a particular region access to some services on the internet involves filtering all out-bound traffics from IP addresses registered to that country. Just like telephone dialing codes, the Internet Assigned Number Authority ensures easy identification of IP locations through a carefully designed method of IP assignment. When a user in China uses a VPN which assigns him/her a US address, all policies configured to deny access to IP addresses originating from China from access a particular internet service becomes ineffective. This is because the source IP has changed. At this point, how will the Chinese authorities determine that an offence has been committed, identify and punish the offender?

Read more https://www.timigate.com/2018/07/how-far-can-vpn-services-protect-you-from-law-enforcement-agents.html