VPN – the foundation of your anonymity and security online

The Internet has become an integral part of our daily lives; almost everyone is well aware of its capabilities, but far from everyone is informed about the structure of the network and the threats that lurk within it. We constantly emphasize in this course that a VPN is the foundation of anonymity and security online, and now I will try to prove this.

I need every reader to understand the structure of the Internet and the threats posed by working online without a VPN. This topic could easily fill an entire book, but you probably won’t read it anyway, so I have no choice but to try to illustrate everything in a few diagrams.

To simplify greatly, all your online activity consists of incoming and outgoing requests. For example, you want to visit the website example.com; you enter the website address in your browser, and the site opens. But let’s start with the fact that example.com is not the address of the site; it is a domain name.

All addresses on the Internet are actually IP addresses, for example, the IP address of CyberYozh.com is 37.48.78.214, and in the early days of the Internet, users would enter an IP address to access a resource. However, it is not easy to remember a string of numbers, which is why domain names were invented. CyberYozh.com is our domain name.

You type CyberYozh.com in your address bar, but how does your computer know what IP address corresponds to this domain name? For this purpose, the Domain Name System, or DNS (Domain Name System), was invented. The role of this system is to answer the question of which IP address corresponds to a website with a given domain name. This does not necessarily have to be a website, but we won’t delve into the details.

The operation of the Domain Name System can be compared to sending a postal letter. You want to send a letter to your uncle, but if you just write your uncle's name on the envelope (analogous to a domain name), that information will be insufficient for the postal service. So, you open your address book and look up your uncle's address and postal code (analogous to an IP address). The address book itself is analogous to a DNS server.

So, you entered the website address and are waiting for it to load, which means the site must send you all the information about how it looks and what it contains. But where will it send this information? It needs a return IP address. And your IP address is sent to it in the first request.

That scary word "IP address" can precisely indicate your location and even, in some situations, your identity. This IP address does not belong to you; it belongs to your Internet service provider, and the provider assigns it to you as part of the service. The provider knows exactly which subscriber it was assigned to and where the exit point to the network is located.