Yesterday I got an email from our ISP warning about copying copyrighted material. The email came with a time and date stamp indicating the time when this infringement was allegedly occurring.
During that time, I was running VPN. It’s in the log. MacOS version 7.14.1.
Isn’t a VPN such as Nord designed to prevent this? Or is that my misunderstanding?
I understand I’ll be receiving a lot of hate for this post because that’s what Reddit is. However, I’m hoping some folks who have a better understanding of VPNs can weigh in with some valuable information.
Isn’t a VPN such as Nord designed to prevent this? Or is that my misunderstanding?
Properly configured, functioning, and used, a VPN should prevent your ISP from knowing what you are doing. But that’s the trick- if you misconfigure it, or something isn’t working right on it(this seems to happen with split-tunneling features on commercial clients a lot), or you misunderstand where and when it’s applying(which is really the same thing as misconfiguration), it won’t prevent anything.
You can have a VPN enabled, and connected, and not be sending any traffic over the VPN if you don’t have something configured correctly. Now, that said, the default settings for commercial VPN clients tends to route everything over the VPN…but if you started tweaking it so that wouldn’t happen, you may have changed something you shouldn’t have and caused your computer to not use the VPN connection even though it was turned on. A VPN provides a different route to a destination, but it doesn’t help you if you don’t actually take that route.
For someone like you who doesn’t know much about VPNs. I recommend using the built in killswitch option in NordVPN.
What this means is that anytime your computer isn’t connected to the VPN then all connections will be blocked. Making it impossible for your ISP to see anything.
You should look up “How to bind _______ to nordvpn network interface.” Where the blank is your torrenting program. This means that your torrent program will ONLY use NordVPN to download stuff and never your regular connection.
ISPs can detect everything when you aren’t connected to the VPN. So make sure you’re connected when you download anything including .torrent files. IDK if you use .torrent files or magnet links to download stuff.
Make sure your torrent program is not automatically starting when you turn on your Mac. This will prevent it from starting before NordVPN does.
I find this interesting because I’m considering going back to NordVPN after having tested Mullvad and Surfshark.
Mullvad’s Kill Switch and Lockdown mode have proven to be very effective for me because I never witnessed any leak (with ipleak.net). However, Surfshark’s Kill Switch is a misery : it’s easy to make it fail by killing the background service’s progress in Task Manager (so imagine if the process crashes by itself, your IP is instantly leaked and you don’t realise it) and it often leaks DNS when I’m switching servers. Contrary to Mullvad’s servers, Surfshark’s are less often blocked by VPN-unfriendly websites (i.e. streaming services) but the quality of service is lagging far behind.
Should I expect problems with Nord’s Kill Switch (I saw mixed reviews about it) ?
I haven’t tweaked any VPN settings. The only thing I do is choose which country—usually USA, but occasionally UK. In this case, I was connected to a USA server.
Since I didn’t tweak anything, my assumption is there’s something about Nord that can automatically become tweaked in such a way that you are no longer protected. I’m going to switch to Express and see if the problem occurs there as well. I suspect it won’t.
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I just downloaded the Nord app and launched it. The UI is pretty basic with a big Connect button. That’s it.
I would’ve thought that would protect and anonymize my internet traffic. I’m not a tech guy so learning the ins and outs of data packets and vpns is well past my abilities.
Yeah, your setup at home, what you are running where etc…it all matters as to whether your VPN setup is working the way you want. You’d have to describe your setup, like do you have more then 1 computer, are things running in VMs, etc to have people be able to help you figure out where the problem is.
The _basic_ test though, for checking if your VPN working, is just go to a site that tells you what your public IP address is. So whatsmyip.org, or type whatsmyip in google serach…the result shouldn’t match what your ISP says your public IP is. As long as the IP that comes back is different, your VPN is _probably_ functioning at a basic level at least (it would be different regardless if your ISP uses CGNAT). That doesn’t necesarrily mean it is doing what you want completely, but at a basic level it’s working. If your VPN is turned on, but your IP still matches what the ISP is issuing you, then it’s probably not working at all/something is misconfigured somewhere.
If you didn’t bind torrent client with VPN it’s on you unfortunately, common mistake that sometimes leads to leaking real IP. Happened with me some years ago with a different VPN when I was new to it and I got a letter too for downloading some movie.
I’m not sure how to do it on MacOS since I never used Mac but basically in your torrent client settings you need to set it to work not with any virtual network adapter but only with specific one that belongs to you VPN. If you use Windows and qBittorrent you simply go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network Interface in qBittorrent and select whatever interface Nord uses on your PC. Try to Google details for MacOS.
Forgot to mention, you can use this P2P test to verify if your IP currently shows over P2P or not: https://ipleak.net/ (scroll down to “Torrent Address detection” function).
I just checked this out of curiosity and my ip matches that shown in the nordvpn app but when I click more info about me it shows my exact current location. Does that mean it’s not actually working?