Full title: Mullvad VPN was subject to a search warrant. Customer data not compromised
As a customer, I have no doubt about the "customer data not compromised". I'm a paying customer, yet I have never given them any PII. Great service.
As a customer, I have no doubt about the "customer data not compromised". I'm a paying customer, yet I have never given them any PII. Great service.
You can get a lot of info through DNS queries for example.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/
(of course, it all depends on the DNS provider you choose)
Of course they “could have” but their entire business depends on them not doing it.
Rättegångsbalken does have a provision that a prosecutor can order you to preserve information you already have saved for a maximum of 180 days (https://lagen.nu/1942:740#K27P16S1). I can't find anything about what the punishment for ignoring such an order would be, but to say a company could be forced to keep operating seems extraordinarily unfounded.
Given Mullvad I think they'd rather shut down.
“Entirely” possible? Sure, I guess it’s “entirely” possible that the NSA is actually controlled by a reptilian, illuminati cabal of extraterrestrials, while we’re just making stuff up without any factual basis whatsoever.
And furthermore, I am sure you know that when dealing with matters of security, it pays to exercise precaution and be wary of scenarios you cannot prove to be happening at the moment. E.g., you don't know your new friend you met at the bus stop is secret police, an informant for the Vichy government, but until you're damn sure he isn't then you don't let him know the location of your resistance safehouse. You don't need to have proof that your new friend has done anything wrong to be cautious of that possibility.
It's not very likely though.
If you can't even remember things in the medium term that's a level beyond "trapped in a dream" that's much more hopeless.
So, with that assumption, you make a computer solve a problem that's impossible for a human to work through in a practical amount of time. And then you verify it got the right answer. This proves the math wasn't done by your dreaming brain. (At least it proves it to a pretty good certainty, and you can repeat the test.)
Many NP-complete problems are good candidates here for slow solutions and fast verifications.
Also for situations that have the standard dream level of fidelity, you can try basic reality checks like putting your finger through your hand or more conspicuously spinning along your own axis.
I thought this was just me! There have been times when I've "read" in dreams (signs, usually), but I don't actually visualize the words. I just "know" what they say.
I would even say "highly unlikely". I revisited how I understand "unlikely" after reading this:
> Radioactive capsule that fell off truck found in Australia... Radiation Services WA general manager Lauren Steen describing it as a "highly unlikely" scenario.
Service might not collect data but they could be forced with warrant to start doing so for specific entities.
This has happened in Finland, for example.
also their business definitely doesn't depend on being honest or standing for their values. there are plenty of vpn's who run on fake marketing that give the impression that they have certain values and do certain things while actually not doing it and they are way more successful than mullvad.
Yes, but Mullvad also doesn’t whore themselves out to any YouTuber that will accept a sponsorship agreement. I’ve never seen an ad for them. I’ve only heard of them from people who tell me they’re the best.
Of course we shouldn’t trust them 100%. Trust isn’t required them competent OpSec is implemented within a workflow. Trust is a vulnerability.
The idea that folk are keeping passwords in some cloud management portal owned by some company boggles my mind. But this is a very controversial opinion and offends many.
You don't have to trust password managers if you don't want to, but if you want others to accept your reasoning as to why, you'll have to convince them using an argument that actually applies.
This does not render the model of keeping the master password client side only moot, it is more secure no matter what. You successfully mitigate the read-only attack of dumping the storage of the cloud provider. However, if you assume a full, on-going compromise of the infrastructure, your password is not secure anymore.
I get that this is moving the goal posts a bit but I wanted to post this anyway. I think if you have highly valuable credentials and want the maximum security for them, you should play out as many possible attack vectors as possible.
But I think this is not fully deployed.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/1/12/diskless-infrastructur...
There are parallels to the now-defunct Crypto AG. Impeccable reputation, but no way of independently verifying it it did what it said on the can. It took decades for the truth about its links to the CIA to come out.
... in a way that you, as a customer, can detect.
1. You can't have any hard guarantees about what information is retained by third parties about you.
2. As other comments here have pointed out, something smells a bit weird with this.
If you're interested in hiding from civil snoops (RIAA, MPAA), by all means, use one. If you're interested in hiding from a government, then by all means, keep rolling the honeypot dice.
If such information is publicly accessible, and it corroborates Mullvad's story here, I'd feel like that's pretty compelling evidence that we can trust that Mullvad isn't simply committing fraud by promising not to log customer data while actually logging it.
You can contact the “Åklagarmyndigheten” (the Swedish prosecutor authority) and ask them and they’ll help you out. Generally speaking it is pretty easy to get information from government agencies in Sweden due to our constitution. Everything is public by default, with some exceptions like military secrets. I think it shouldn’t be a problem for the prosecutor to confirm they had a warrant at Mullvads office, and maybe even to confirm they didn’t seize anything, unless they think it could harm the ongoing investigation somehow.
[0] https://www.aklagare.se/om_rattsprocessen/fran-brott-till-at...
By nature, every VPN gets at least the IP you are connecting from and the IPs (and almost always also hostnames) you are connecting to. I'd consider that PII.
> Can I really pay with cash?
> You bet, and please! Stay anonymous all the way. Just put your cash and payment token (randomly generated on our website) in an envelope and send it to us. We accept the following currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, SEK, DKK, NOK, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD.
> Can I really pay with cash? > You bet, and please! Stay anonymous all the way. Just put your cash and payment token (randomly generated on our website) in an envelope and send it to us. We accept the following currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, SEK, DKK, NOK, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD.
So, yes, there is a theory that someone may go in the trash in Sweden, finds the envelope, the stamp (and it has to be a british one), investigate who bought the stamp, get the assistance of the shopkeeper in UK (without raising suspicions), successfully reviews tons of security cameras footage to find who bought, etc.
And still don't know which activity to link it to.
A perfect waste of public resources if the NSA really does that, when all they needed to do is to purchase a VPN provider or fund Tor and claim to be no-logs VPN ;)
Better yet, they shred it: https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#payments.
Presumably the theory is more like [1] - that the postal service, when they scan the envelope to read the address, save the scanned image and give it to the cops.
I agree that the NSA would be better off just running their own VPN services - or indeed intercepting everything on major backbones and just seeing what source IPs connect to Mullvad's servers.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/us-postal-servic...
Storage is cheap - really cheap. I bet automatically capturing images of all mail during sorting and archiving that for years is not only viable, but a vital investigation/intelligence tool. One would ask Mullvad for the cash payment dates[1], and cross-reference with all mail sent to a Mullvad postal address. One city-level datapoint on where user was, cross-checked with the latest IP address, where stamps were bought[2], and you've massively trimmed the list of suspects, especially if they are behind a NAT and sharing the IP.
1. They have to keep track of payment dates, which is a side channel.
2. Where and when stamps were bought. I'm certain GCHQ can keep track of individual stamp IDs, the batches they belonged to, when they were procured by the retailer and have a reasonable guess when that specific stamp was bought by mail-sender.
You can get scans of all your mail through the informed delivery program.
"Put the money in an envelope together with the payment token and send it to us. We will open the envelope, add time to the account (corresponding to the amount of cash sent), and then use a shredder to destroy the envelope and its non-money contents."
Source: https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#payments
The UK will know with certainty that a specific stamp was used to send a specific envelope to Mullvad. (e.g., America has been logging images of every envelope that passes through its postal service for over two decades).
It would also be trivial for the UK to know:
- When and where that stamp was initially sold (and to whom, if buying online!)
- When and where an envelope bearing that stamp entered the postal system
- When and where envelopes with other stamps from the same booklet entered the postal system
Add up enough bits and you can pierce anonymity.
This is a misconception caused by the scale of surveillance today. In the old days you were right. To do this kind of tracing they'd have to assign someone to do it which takes human resources and is not infinitely scalable. So they'd only do it to people deemed interesting enough, so average Joe was safe.
Today the scope has changed completely. Everything can be correlated all the time, so it is. No suspicion or probable cause needed.
If they don't do that, if they meet the stamp along the letter's journey, they can scan the code and check which batch it's from, and there could be a database of which post office got which batch, and then it's a matter of checking that post office's purchases/security cameras.
If all stamps are indistinguishable from each other, then you could've bought the stamp months ago on the Isle of Skye and used it in London, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Perfect anonymity is probably impossible because information theory is impossible to escape. Which means you are trying to determine how far along the spectrum you can reasonably get for your particular risk profile.
Comments that pretend like perfect anonymity is the goal or act like it's binary are singularly unhelpful.
On the other hand, if you don't trust Mullvad's assertion that they delete the link between accounts and credit card payment records after 40 days [1], what makes you think you can trust them to not keep a record of individual scratch cards sold on Amazon, which Amazon can then correlate to an order ID and by extension account and shipping address?
At a higher level, if somebody can convince Mullvad to collude in that manner, they can likely also just ask them to outright hand over your traffic flows and connection data.
By the end of the day I agree, if you have any "real" reason for using VPN you pretty much have to implicitly trust your provider to not keep any traffic flows and connections that could correlate traffic to your IP, but not even sending money in envelope saves your from that.
If your worried about anything in a 40 day window the credit card <-> account_id is a liability
Amazon doesn’t know the redemption code on the gift card. So Amazon knows that you purchased a Mullvad gift card, but can’t associate the transaction with a Mullvad account. Likewise Mullvad knows service was paid for with a gift card (possibly that the gift card is from a lot sold on Amazon). But they do not know which Amazon transaction the card is associated with.
Unless your behavior and the behavior of others deanonymizes the Amazon purchase <-> redemption your account should be indistinguishable from any other that purchased a Mullvad gift card from Amazon in that window of time.
You can pay a Lightning invoice to get a voucher which is redeemable on the website. You get an extra layer of privacy, and also don't need to wait for an on chain transaction.