It’s Cyber Monday – and that means there's a ton of hefty bargains to be had. VPNs joined in the fun before Black Friday, too, with the cheapest prices we’ve seen all year, and they've carried through to the Cyber Monday VPN sales. All in all, it’s a great time to subscribe to a service.
If you’re more concerned about your digital privacy than saving each and every penny you can, however, you’ll be glad to learn that plenty of today’s best VPNs prioritize your security in a major way – and we're not talking the bare minimum, here.
Keep reading, and I’ll walk you through the huge savings available across the best secure VPNs, and why these handy pieces of tech are a must-have in today’s dangerous digital world.
Why you need a secure VPN
One glance at today’s cybersecurity news paints a grim picture – data breaches abound, snoopers are constantly sniffing after identifiable data, and censorship runs riot throughout countries with oppressive governments. It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of these threats, but there are a few things you can do to shore up your personal online privacy.
The best, easiest, and most efficient of these is to invest in a secure VPN. Right off the bat, once you’ve picked out a provider, a plan, and downloaded the app onto your device of choice, your VPN will encrypt all of that device’s traffic. This makes it effectively unreadable to potential hackers and bad actors – and means you can go about your regular browsing with increased security.
A VPN’s functionality doesn’t end there, however, and most of today’s top picks all have a selection of tools designed to make the internet a safer, more private, place to be. Here are some of my favorites:
- Encryption: this is a VPN’s bread and butter and the first thing any privacy-minded user should check out. Titans like NordVPN, Surfshark, and ExpressVPN use AES-256 encryption, which is the industry standard, and virtually uncrackable. It’s exactly what you want to keep your all-important personal information secure and out of the hands of bad actors.
- Kill switch: a VPN kill switch ensures that you don’t accidentally leave a trail of identifiable details over the web as you do your thing online. How? Well, they cut your internet connection if your VPN drops out for whatever reason, preventing you from sending unencrypted traffic over an unsecured route.
- Audit: this is a big one – today’s most trustworthy VPNs have all undergone third-party audits that verify that they stick to their no-logs privacy policies (and aren’t keeping hold of your data). Without an audit, there’s no way to prove that a VPN isn’t logging your information, and you’ll have to take their word on trust alone. That’s not ideal… or recommended.
- Stealth: a handful of VPNs have their own Stealth VPN protocols which are especially handy for folks dealing with VPN bans. Whether they’re enforced by your school, workplace, or even your government, VPN bans can be a real nuisance and cut you off from a world’s worth of content. A stealth protocol disguises VPN traffic as regular old HTTP traffic, however, making it much harder for ban enforcement to notice it.
- Extras: take a look at our top-rated VPNs and you’ll notice that they all have something in common – they offer a ton of extra privacy-boosting tools included in their bundles. These range from password managers to ad blockers, from cloud storage to data broker removal services. If you’re interested in really, seriously, shoring up your personal security, it’s worth taking a look over Cyber Monday.
