Reading the parent pdf vs Nord's response [0] I'm slightly more inclined to believe Nords version of events here...
I used NordVPN for about a year a couple of years ago and I found their quality of service unsatisfactory. I've been using ProtonVPN for about a year now and I've been very satisfied. But that's just my personal experience and YMMV.
> Within an hour of this in-person and unannounced visit, the same TorGuard contractor received unsolicited correspondence from an employee at NordVPN. This correspondence stated that NordVPN had received certain of TorGuard’s confidential and trade secret information and requested to set up an instant message chat to discuss this with TorGuard.
Also, according to both parties they communicated with each other with evidence. So all either party has to do to claim their innocence is submit the emails/communications they claimed to have.
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The DDOS part I'm very weary about. What evidence does torguard have that NordVPN was the one carrying out the DDOS attacks? I'll admit I haven't thoroughly examined the entire document, but they don't really seem to state how they know NordVPN was behind the attacks, they just list the dates they were attacked. Given the nature of DDOS attacks, they could be from anyone.
Or oxylabs.io who I think owns luminati?
I'm also aware that many of the VPNs are owned by the same parent companies.
And also that VPNs are ridiculously over marketed. They don't "add security" for most people, they just move who you're trusting from your ISP to the VPN company. Right, like I want to trust a company registered in Panama with no other existence outside of this year not to sell my data.
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tl;dr - I don't trust any of them. If I want a "VPN" I just ssh-tunnel into a VPS from an established company that I purchase with a different account. Could the VPS provider do fishy stuff? Sure, but I trust them a lot more then these "VPN" providers.
I'm thankful that linustechtips seems to evaluate their VPN sponsors at least. I believe they dropped tunnelbear in favor of PIA because of similar concerns.
PIA has cross pollination with IP blocks owned by Micfo subsidiaries as well. They're all like 2 degrees away from each other.
Between your link, and the luminati faq's, I definitely have more questions then when I started looking at these articles.
I asked, and they are only interested in partners with 100k active users a month. They REALLY REALLY wanted to talk to me over skype. Right, like a legitimate company with that many users is going to use luminati.
The use case of luminati is almost entirely grey/black hat. Their history is laughably sketchy. Unless anybody knows of any apps that use the SDK and ask for permission, I suspect that FAQ page is just for show. Again you have to be a big player to even use it, it's not a stretch to believe they don't "enforce" the consent rule.
For non-state actors my "data" is gone. You'd need a warrant to get data from my VPS provider, so for most of the common threats I'm pretty anonymous to non-state actors.
Maybe you don't want your employer to see everything you search? Interestingly for programmers the ssh-tunnel is perfectly explainable, especially if you do most of your browsing in the clearnet, and only some over your ssh-tunnel.
If your threat model includes state actors (doing something illegal hmmmm?) then I would recommend doing something a bit different, but for what most people are using services like Nord for ssh + vps should be fine.
EDIT: If yall are torrenting then just get a 10$/mo seedbox, you'll thank me later.
One option is to use basically any provider + prepaid visa cards. Just access the website over tor or a VPN you semi trust. Sure it's technically traceable but not without a lot of trouble.
Keep in mind that once the VPS provider is issued a subpoena they still have access to your connecting computer's IP. They then have to issue a subpoena to your ISP for your account information. The only way to hide your IP is to use a proxy or a vpn... Oh wait, yeah that's the issue. See [0]
I personally just recommend using whatever you'd like, Vultr, DO, scaleway, etc. Feralhosting isn't anonymous but they uh... don't care what you really use it for cough torrents cough.
[0] If you're REALLY trying to be fully anonymous then you'll need to put on your blackhat. I would start with planting a raspberry pi in a business, library, coffeeshop, etc. You can use that IP as a starting point. You won't want to use only that one IP most likely, so you're going to need more proxies/servers, most common method is botnets. This really isn't worth the trouble to 99.9999% of people.
Edit: I guess I'm estimating there are ~7,000 people in the world who it's worth the trouble to do.... Actually that might be accurate, cool! :D
Honestly I don't think the extra step is worth it since the VPS will still know your origin IP in the event of a subpoena anyway.
You could try https://privacy.com but ironically I doubt it'll help much in terms of privacy. (I use privacy for convenience, as it essentially mitigates your card numbers being leaked - they're locked to the vender and you can impose spending limits)
Unfortunately I doubt there's many people who want 100% privacy that you'd want as customers if you're a VPS provider. I know Vultr accepts crypto but you have to prove your identity first (still great if you're a crypto advocate as privacy isn't the only benefit).
Otherwise you're stuck with resellers and grey-market providers. You could try "bulletproof" hosts from various uh-greyhat-forums but trusting those is very mehhhhh.
VPS providers can log connections and you won't really know how long they retain the data until it matters.
EDIT: I realized this question might be confusing in this context. I'm not talking about torrenting large files (which you wouldn't want to do over Tor). I'm just wondering if it's possible to run a VPS with 100% anonymity.
Interesting. I mean, Tor was was originally developed by the Navy as an OSINT tool, and later released because an "anonymity" network only used by the Navy isn't very useful.
More and more often non-state actors are doing what used to be in the purview of intelligence services, so it passes the sniff test.
But without specific evidence all I'll say is "plausible, but unconfirmed" :)
The end result if you actually fall for their bullshit is that your IP space will be listed in every RBL until the end of time, and will have a bottom 5% rank in every IP space reputation/antifraud system until the heat death of the universe.
Every time I've been approached by these clowns, I've spent a cursory 3 to 5 minutes trying to find an actual business behind it (names of real humans, street address that isn't just a mailbox, location of real ISP infrastructure equipment at some real IX points) and failed to find anything resembling a legitimate ISP.
Also, is there an "affordable" way to own an IP?
I'm more inclined to say they don't know who it was, but pointing fingers, and Black Friday to maximize the potential damages reward.
The legal case also says "unknown individual"; so they could be a run-of-the-mill reporter or something.
A lot of what Torguard is saying in the case is pretty benign. An email from header can be faked, trade secrets, if left on the open web... aren't really secret anymore.
Nord isnt in a clean place either. Their response is making claims that the legal case doesnt even touch.
"35. The DDoS attacks directed against TorGuard were based upon the Information— the nature and way they occurred and were timed made it patently obvious that the attacker had obtained the Information from Collective 7 and was utilizing it as a roadmap for DDoS attacks."
If those were infrastructure IP's, and not otherwise public, that would certainly make more sense as to how Torguard believes Nord was responsible.
I know they used the timing like Black Friday as evidence that it was a competitor carrying out the attacks, but they have lots of competitors, so I was really confused as to how they settled on Nord as the attacker.
1) Someone supposedly "gave" them the URL. They do not state how they found it, or how it was related to TorGuard. So who gave it to them? The Collective 7 hosting company? It appears Collective 7 was selling "Residential Solutions for VPN Providers":
http://web.archive.org/web/20171215024207/http://collectives...
2) Did they ask TorGuard to censor Youtuber "Tom spark reviews"? It seems he is critical of them: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXJWKuGh0qedrYviGEJmlWw
Tom Spark was also doxxed by the ProtonMail Reddit rep for posting videos they did not like: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/96m5vc/is_it_tru...
Found the link here: https://medium.com/@gaetanosabin/did-nordvpn-and-protonmail-...
So it doesn't surprise me that NordVPN (Proton) wants this Youtube Streamer's videos and blog taken down.
Shouldn't NordVPN and Proton uphold user privacy and fight against internet censorship? They are doing the exact opposite here and that is very troubling.
I was able fact-check his claims, since I am from the city where Tesonet is based, and found none of them to be completely false or baseless. It turned out to be an open secret in the local tech community[1].
[1] https://i0.wp.com/vpnscam.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/201...
I think it's a normal practice in every industry to try to find out who your competitors really are. Whether that information should be made public or not is a different question, but it doesn't make it inherently false. Instead of naively believing in carefully crafted rebuttals, people should try to verify the facts by themselves.
Even taking into account the insanity of legalese that lawsuit was... wordy, at best. Poorly organized and repetitive would also apply.
Is TorGuard related in any way to the “tor” project?
Answer: No, The reference to "tor" in TorGuard relates to "torrents" and guarding one’s privacy when using bitorrent. We are not related in any way to the “tor” project however the company does support through donations.