VPN Protection from Malicious Software?

The simple answer to this question is yes. To appreciate this better, it is important to understand how hackers ‘plant’ malicious software or malware, as they are more popularly known on your computer.

There are over 2.08 billion internet users worldwide. If they tried to implant their malware on to every computer in the world, antivirus programs would quickly detect the trend, even if it was done in phases, and come up with their own ways to combat the threat. Because manufacturers of antivirus programs employ top-notch data security experts and programmers, it would be hard for hackers if they tried to attack everyone connected to the internet.

The solution is to bypass antivirus programs by selectively targeting users, and so ‘fly under the radar’ in the hope of being undetected. There are a lot of programs, even those written by users, and antivirus programs cannot distinguish between genuine (‘good’) and malicious (‘bad’) software.

Only when a program displays characteristics of malicious software does the antivirus solution label it as ‘bad’ and take appropriate action, like blocking its access to everything else and deleting it from your computer. So there could be ‘intrusive’ software that lies dormant, collecting data and sending everything it has gathered to the hacker at one go, before the antivirus can swing into effect.

Not every user in the world has data that would be valuable to a hacker. Today, the motives are monetary, as opposed to earlier when they crashed systems for fun, just to make their mark amongst their peers in the underground hacker community. So they look for people who visit banking websites or e-commerce shopping portals. These are the ones most likely to log in to electronic banking or enter credit/debit card details online.

How they identify these users is by looking at their cookies – these are small files stored on local computers that record websites/pages visited and when. This is also how ad servers send targeted advertising to you (like how you were looking at shoes on an internet shopping portal and you see an ad for the very same pair of shoes, and from the exact same website, when you visit another page later).

Protect yourself with a VPN

A Virtual Private Network involves a physical server that comes between you and the website that you visit. Before forwarding your request for content access to the web server (this is what happens when you type in say, www.australianvpn.com in to your browser – it sends a request to the web server), the VPN server appends the request to replace your IP address – this determines your location in the cyber world – with its own, so that hackers can only see the IP address of the VPN server and not yours. Any malicious/intrusive software is directed to the VPN server and not your computer.

The data between you and the VPN is also encrypted, meaning any malicious/intrusive software present on the VPN server sees only ‘junk’ characters and not meaningful information that would be of any value to hackers. Could the malicious/intrusive software have decryption capabilities? Theoretically yes, but this would increase its size considerably, and the malicious/intrusive software would take up a chunk of processing power. All these would make its existence known – so malicious/intrusive software are not written thus.