An unpatched vulnerability in iOS 13.3.1 and later means connections established before turning on a VPN will remain outside the VPN’s secure tunnel.<\/p>\n
“Typically, when you connect to a virtual private network (VPN), the operating system of your device closes all existing Internet connections and then re-establishes them through the VPN tunnel,” explained<\/strong><\/a> VPN provider ProtonVPN.<\/p>\n “A member of the Proton community discovered that in iOS version 13.3.1, the operating system does not close existing connections.”<\/p>\n ProtonVPN said that while most of these connections are short-lived, some of these unprotected connections can remain open for minutes or even hours.<\/p>\n It highlighted that this vulnerability can affect any app or service – including instant messaging apps and Apple’s push notifications.<\/p>\n According to ProtonVPN, this vulnerability could allow user data to be exposed if these non-protected connections are not encrypted themselves.<\/p>\n More importantly, however, attackers could see the user’s IP address, as well of the address of the servers they’re connecting to.<\/p>\n This would be the user’s true address, rather than the address of the VPN server.<\/p>\n Because of this, those in countries where surveillance is common are at high risk of having their web history exposed.<\/p>\n ProtonVPN said that neither it nor any other VPN service could implement a technical workaround as iOS does not allow VPN apps to terminate existing network connections.<\/p>\n However, users can manually ensure that all old connections are terminated by doing the following:<\/p>\n However, ProtonVPN cautioned that it could not absolutely guarantee that all connections would reconnect inside the VPN tunnel.<\/p>\n Apple has recommended users use Always-on VPN to mitigate this issue, although this does not work for third-party VPNs like ProtonVPN.<\/p>\n An unpatched vulnerability in iOS 13.3.1 and later means connections established before turning on a VPN will remain outside the VPN’s secure tunnel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341039,"featured_media":263965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[691,63855,18448],"class_list":["post-344983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-ios","tag-protonvpn","tag-vpn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344983"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341039"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344983"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":345011,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344983\/revisions\/345011"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How user data is exposed<\/h3>\n
How to work around the vulnerability<\/h3>\n
\n
Now read: Google services hit by outages<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"