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Am I safe 100% from ISP tracking with Avast VPN from desktop tower? A lot of what I saw was about unsecure Wi-Fi. This would be connected through a Cat 5 cable to a modem. Right now I have no wireless to deal with but will soon. I do not want my ISP to even be able to see where or what I am doing.

Giacomo1968
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user442806
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2 Answers2

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In the end, you are never entirely safe from your ISP, but you are probably safe enough, unless your adversary is a nation-state level actor. for instance the ISP can always intercept your VPN connection initiation, and masquerade as the VPN provider, which exposes all of your traffic to them. It's not an easy attack, but many ISPs have lots of resources to throw at a problem, especially if the NSA demands it. When you are facing that kind of adversary, there is very little you can do.

As for Wifi, the main reason you use a VPN on unsecured wifi, is to prevent other users on that wifi from attacking you, ala Firesheep. By using a VPN, you isolate yourself from the local peers, not from the upstream providers.

Frank Thomas
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Providing your VPN encrypts the data you send and receive securely, you are pretty safe. I'm not familiar with Avast's VPN system as I use Cyberghost myself.

The basic principal behind a VPN, however, is that the software on your PC will encrypt data, send it to a VPN server, which decrypts it, connects to the server of whatever website you're connecting to, grabs the relevant data, encrypts it, sends it back to you, then your PC will decrypt the data.

Overall, your ISP shouldn't see much more than you connecting to one server and sending a large amount of data regularly. They will know it's a VPN server, but that's all they know. If they were to steal the data, they'd have to spend ages cracking it, and that's time and resource consuming. Unless you're sharing copious amounts of child abuse images, or torrenting 200GB of illegal and pirated files, your ISP probably isn't interested in your internet activities anyway.

With your VPN connected, they couldn't see what you were doing anyway

To make sure your VPN is that secure, however, go here And run the "extended test". If all the results that come back are from your VPN company, it's almost completely safe to assume you are totally protected from the prying eyes of anyone.

It's also a good idea to make sure the VPN company doesn't keep logs. If possible, try connecting to a server in Sweden, where logging is illegal.

As for connecting to your home router wirelessly, that isn't a problem either. Only people connected to your router have the opportunity to see what you are doing, and even then, it's not as easy as just connecting to your router and hacking your PC. But even then, your VPN software will encrypt the data the moment it leaves your PC, so even if someone managed to intercept the short range connection form your PC to your router, they'd see the same as your ISP - virtually nothing except scrambled, encrypted data

Tom Gibbs
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