Does a VPN encrypt everything we send?
It encrypts traffic between your device and the VPN gateway, not the whole way to the destination. Behind the gateway, traffic continues to the office network or the internet protected only by whatever the application itself uses, such as HTTPS. A company VPN therefore protects staff on hotel or café Wi-Fi from local eavesdropping and gives them access to internal systems; it does not make an unencrypted internal application safe, and it hides nothing from the company network that receives the traffic. Split tunnelling sends only some traffic through the VPN and the rest directly, which helps performance but means company monitoring sees only part of it. A commercial VPN service moves your trust from the internet provider to the VPN provider. VPN gateways themselves are frequent targets and need fast patching and multi-factor authentication (MFA). From the network, VPN tunnels are visible as connections to the gateway, with their timing and volume, not their content.
Read next
Related questions
- How do I find all SSH servers on our network, including forgotten ones?
- How do I check which servers run an OpenSSH version affected by a new CVE?
- Does an SSH version banner prove a server is vulnerable?
- Can NetSenX detect threats in encrypted traffic?
- Can NDR detect threats in encrypted traffic without decrypting it?
← All 40 questions on Encryption and encrypted trafficAll topics