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“Many high-surveillance jurisdictions overtly outlaw the use of VPNs, while others use it as a cause for suspicion.”ĭespite the laudable reasons for designing ways to preserve the privacy of internet users, there’s always the possibility that they can be abused. “The people who need to be most concerned about network surveillance are also the ones most likely to be apprehended and prosecuted for using it in the first place,” Bambenek said. MultiHop+ can create another problem for users. However, he added, “This method likely would increase the latency of your connections as your traffic needs to transit multiple servers and is being encrypted multiple times.”
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Since Atlas VPN is a paid service, it should produce a better and faster user experience than a free VPN service or Tor, Hicks maintained. “Many organizations will block Tor but allow inbound connects from VPN endpoints,” he explained.
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“It presumably offers a similar layer of privacy as Tor without the suspicion that traffic from Tor end nodes generates,” Bambenek said. While MultiHop+ offers the benefits of Tor, it does so without some of the drawbacks of the open-source technology. “Typically this is marketed to people concerned about government surveillance,” added Bambenek, “perhaps even those who are concerned about the ubiquitous monitoring by surveillance capitalists that have branded themselves as tech companies.” Potential for Abuse “If state security services were able to track them down via their traffic and identify them, it could have serious implications for their physical safety,” he explained. Hicks agreed that reporters and activists in countries with oppressive regimes could benefit from MultiHop+. “Currently, users can choose from two MultiHop+ server chains, including Europe and North America,” she told TechNewsWorld. “While regular VPN servers are enough for most internet users, people living in highly censored countries, as well as journalists and activists, can highly benefit from added protection,” Atlas VPN PR Manager Ruta Cizinauskaite said in a news release. That means that each time a user accesses a different domain, their traffic takes a new and random route through the network, which makes it near impossible to predict and track. What’s unique to MultiHop+, though, is that the exit server rotates throughout the browsing. Like the Tor network, the servers within the Atlas VPN MultiHop+ chain are selected randomly. Used to access the dark web, it uses a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than 6,000 relays, to conceal a user’s location and usage from traffic snoopers.
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Tor is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication on the internet. “MultiHop works similar to the Tor network which makes it very hard to trace online activity back to an individual user,” Jason Hicks, field CISO and executive advisor at Coalfire, a provider of cybersecurity advisory services in Westminster, Colo., told TechNewsWorld. MultiHop+ is available with a premium subscription to Atlas VPN. That protects the traffic with an additional layer of encryption and hides their identity behind multiple IP addresses from different geographical locations. With MultiHop+, a user’s internet traffic is sent to several VPN servers simultaneously. “Multihop enables a layer of ambiguity where such correlation becomes more difficult,” John Bambenek, a principal threat hunter at Netenrich IT, a digital security operations company in San Jose, Calif., told TechNewsWorld. The problem with that method is it’s still possible to track down a VPN user by correlating the connectivity to a VPN endpoint with traffic out of the endpoint. Interaction with the internet is done from the VPN server, which masks a user’s true IP address and real identity.
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All traffic in the tunnel is encrypted to protect its privacy. With a traditional VPN, a “tunnel” is created between a user and a VPN server. It does that by allowing users to connect to the internet through several rotating VPN locations simultaneously. The paid VPN service has introduced a new way to route internet traffic, called MultiHop+, that’s more secure and private than conventional methods. Security-minded internet users looking for another layer of obscurity when traveling in cyberspace can have it with some new tech announced Monday by Atlas VPN.
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