Enhancing Online Security and Privacy with Personal VPN’s
Discover the transformative power of personal VPNs in fortifying online security and enhancing privacy for your business. In an era where cyber threats loom large and data breaches are costly, a reliable personal VPN is not just a tool—it's an essential asset for safeguarding your company's confidential data.
In today's digital age, where our lives are woven into the fabric of the internet, ensuring online security and privacy has become paramount. From banking transactions to social media interactions, much of our personal and sensitive information is transmitted over networks, making it susceptible to prying eyes and potential cyber threats. Amidst these concerns, the adoption of personal Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) has emerged as a potent solution.
How Does a VPN Help You?
A personal VPN serves as a secure tunnel for your internet connection, encrypting the data you send and receive, thus shielding it from eavesdroppers and hackers. Whether you're browsing from a coffee shop's Wi-Fi or accessing your bank account on public transport, a VPN adds an extra layer of protection, making it significantly harder for cybercriminals to intercept your sensitive information.
VPNs also safeguard your privacy by masking your IP address and anonymizing your online activities. This means that your browsing history and online behavior remain confidential, shielded from the prying eyes of internet service providers, advertisers, and other third parties seeking to track your digital footprint for targeted marketing or surveillance purposes.
Moreover, personal VPNs enable users to bypass geographic restrictions and censorship, granting access to region-locked content. Whether you're traveling abroad or wish to access streaming services unavailable in your region, a VPN allows you to circumvent these barriers, providing a seamless online experience without compromising your privacy or security.
Choose a VPN Provider Wisely
However, while personal VPNs offer numerous benefits, it's essential to choose a reputable provider that prioritizes user privacy. Don’t fall for gimmicks. We recommend Express VPN.
But Do You Really Need One?
VPN’s add another layer of complexity and network overhead, eating your bandwidth. There was a time when nearly everything on the Internet wasn’t encrypted, and VPNs were necessary, but this isn’t the case today. In modern computing, nearly everything you do online is encrypted. There’s an argument to be made: if you don’t have a need to access region-blocked content, and if your use case doesn’t involve a lot of risk (you’re not browsing questionable sites or downloading files), why spend the money?
Like everything in IT security, VPNs offer another layer of safeguards but aren’t a magic pill. They don’t solve all problems and aren't necessary in most cases—just another expense that adds a diminishing return on value.
What’s my Advice?
Just reach out. I can help answer this kind of question for you. Thanks for reading.
R
Google Data Migration Service START Button Grayed Out
So, maybe you’re like me.
You’ve got a 100 or so user’s mailboxes you need to migrate from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace.
You’ve completed your setups; the impersonation rights are set on your global admin in M365, and, you’ve assigned full control rights over all target mailboxes.
You strike up Workspace and start the Data Migration Service, successfully authenticate, and start adding users, but it won’t let you. You’ve got a GRAY START BUTTON like this.
And it’s frustrating the hell out of you because, hey, you’re a good tech, you did your planning, etc.
Well, I found a solution.
What’s happening here is that you’ve authenticated this process under another domain and not the domain you think you’re targetting. The oAuth token isn’t being saved under the right account or domain.
For me, I was in my Google Reseller console trying to kick this off, and the damn thing was trying to target my own domain rather than the tenant’s domain.
So, kill the data migration.
Login to the admin console under a Super Admin for your domain under an incognito window and set up the Data Migration Service parameters again.
You should now be able to target a user by typing … it matches, you can press start.
There’s nothing like this in the docs, of course, but hey, I just pulled my hair out for an hour … maybe I can help save yours :)
R
Microsoft L2TP Client Work-Around
Microsoft broke its own L2TP Client with its January 2022 roll-up patches. Here’s a quick fix to both keep the roll-ups as well as to allow L2TP VPN’s to work normally on a Windows 10 or Windows 11 computer.
On January 11, 2022, Microsoft released Windows 10 KB5009543 and Windows 11 KB5009566 as a part of their January 2022 roll-up. After applying the patches, administrators found that L2TP connections from remote Windows computers using the L2TP client would fail on connection.
At the time of this writing, Microsoft hasn’t pulled the roll-up and hasn’t issued a hotfix, suggesting instead that the IPSEC server be modified to disable the VendorID field in negotiation.
As this isn’t an option for most firewalls and would require vendors to post firmware updates for tens of thousands of product SKU’s, this effectively turned this problem into a pissing match between hardware vendors and Microsoft. Hardware vendors claim this is a Microsoft issue and advise customers to reverse the patch; Microsoft claims their implementation of the IPSEC client is correct. Meanwhile, VPN’s for millions of people working from home don’t work.
Reversing the patch may not be a suitable option when dealing with classified networks; as a system administrator, I’ve an obligation to apply Microsoft’s roll-ups to protect my clients’ data and network. Doing so may not only jeopardize IT assets that I’m responsible for but may just invalidate cyberinsurance policies because I did the exact opposite that I was supposed to do: I sacrificed a bunch of security patches in favor of one working feature; a feature that would break again unless I disabled patching on a remote machine, only exacerbating the problem over time.
The real fix for this, then, is for Microsoft to either pull the patch or issue a hotfix. Since Microsoft is (again) not stepping up to address messes that it makes, there’s a good work-around.
On a machine that doesn’t have the KB updates mentioned above (or reverse the KB on the affected machine), find the file c:\windows\system32\ikeext.dll. It’ll be dated 2021.
Copy this file out to where you have a copy of it.
Apply the Jan 2022 patches and reboot.
You’ll now find a 2022 version of ikeext.dll in the c:\windows\system32 folder.
Take control of that file by changing its ownership to a local administrator (perhaps the user account you’re using), and change your permissions to Full Control.
Using Task Manager, under the Services Tab, find ikeet.dll and stop it.
Rename c:\windows\system32\ikeext.dll to *.old, providing administrator elevation to do so.
Copy in your 2021 version of ikeext.dll to the same path.
Restart the ikeet.dll under the Services Tab or reboot the machine.
You’ll find that your L2TP VPN will now work, keeping the Jan 2022 patches and isolating the roll-back to just one DLL.
R
** Update: Microsoft has now issued a out-of-band update KB5010793 to address this issue.