You may have noticed some VPN providers offering enhanced blocking services (for an additional fee, of course). In this article, we are going to take a look at NordVPN’s Threat Protection Pro features and prove that you don’t need to pay extra for security - if you happen to use Windscribe.
Beyond the VPN Tunnel
Traditionally, VPN providers usually do one thing: proxy packets to the destination in order to mask your source IP address from sites you visit. This may be a shocker, but this does virtually nothing for your privacy or security.
If your VPN provider doesn't offer any server side blocking, your security and privacy remain virtually unaffected whether you use a VPN or not. This is due to the fact that when you browse and happen to land on a malicious website that distributes malware, or tries to fool you into exposing your credentials it makes no difference that your IP is different. The compromise will happen just the same.
In case of privacy, virtually the same thing is true. When you browse, your browser (and random apps you have on your phone) connect to dozens or sometimes hundreds of tracking platforms on every single website you visit, or silently in the background while the app is running.
This leaves countless tracking cookies and local storage data in your browser, or inside the app, which is then used to track you across the web, regardless of your IP.
If you accessed a website without a VPN at any point in the past (or future), going to the same site while using a VPN does not make you any more anonymous or private, and it's quite trivial to link your previous ISP assigned IP to your VPN IP. The only solution is to prevent such connections from ever being made.
This is why some VPN platforms started offering server (and client) side blocking in the recent years. Windscribe was one of the first, offering this feature since 2018, which has been significantly improved over the years.
Some popular VPNs are starting to play catchup and are also offering similar features (for an additional price), but how effective are they? Let's find out.
Test Setup
For the purposes of this test we used three common and reputable blocklists that contain malicious domains, phishing websites, and ad/tracking domains respectively.
- Malware: https://hole.cert.pl/domains/domains.txt
- Phishing: https://phishing.army/download/phishing_army_blocklist.txt
- Ads & Trackers: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sjhgvr/oisd/main/oisd_big.txt
- This list was post-processed to strip out AdBlock syntax formatting
The test was conducted using the following steps, on Oct 17th 2024.
NordVPN
- Connect to a random NordVPN server with all "Threat Protection Pro" features enabled, including DNS Filtering.
- Run a Powershell script that iterates through the above files and counts number of NXDOMAIN responses.
Windscribe
- Connect to a random Windscribe server with R.O.B.E.R.T. blocking Malware and Ads & Trackers to match Nord's settings.
- Run a Powershell script that iterates through the above files and counts number of 0.0.0.0 responses (Windscribe returns this IP instead of NXDOMAIN for better performance).
Test Results
Once the scripts chewed though the block list files, the results were as follows.
NordVPN
Malware Blocking
- Total Domains: 240506
- Blocked Domains: 231284
- Resolved Domains: 9222
- % Blocked: 96.16%
Phishing
- Total Domains: 244570
- Blocked Domains: 237199
- Resolved Domains: 7371
- % Blocked: 96.98%
Ads & Trackers
- Total Domains: 136754
- Blocked Domains: 135703
- Resolved Domains: 1051
- % Blocked: 99.23%
Windscribe
Malware
- Total Domains: 240506
- Blocked Domains: 240505
- Resolved Domains: 1
- % Blocked: 99.99%
Phishing
- Total Domains: 244570
- Blocked Domains: 244451
- Resolved Domains: 119
- % Blocked: 99.95%
Ads & Trackers
- Total Domains: 136754
- Blocked Domains: 136701
- Resolved Domains: 53
- % Blocked: 99.96%
Conclusion
The results above demonstrate that Windscribe's security oriented blocking, as well as ad & tracker blocking are far more effective than Nord's premium features that they charge extra money for.
In case of Windscribe, this is all available to all users, including those on a free plan. In fact, our sister company Control D uses the same blocklists as Windscribe, which you can also use entirely for free part of our Free DNS offering.
