Originally Posted by javacontour
Okay,
I get the idea of a VPN to corporate network so I can get to the back office stuff.
Other than spoofing the BBC regarding my location, making them think I'm in the UK so I can get programming as if I was in the UK, I'm really not seeing the point of a VPN. Certainly not from a security standpoint.
We see these commercials about "Don't let the bad guys get your banking info..."
Well, it's not like my VPN provider has a connection into my bank's network. The VPN just changes the where my traffic enters the general public internet and goes to the bank and has all the same vulnerabilities as if the traffic came from my home, or mobile phone, or frankly, even that coffee shop connection. Unless I'm an idiot and not using an HTTPS connection to my bank, even the coffee shop free WiFi isn't really a problem.
If you want to spoof where you are, or you are connecting to your corporate network so you can get to back office servers, I'm not seeing the value proposition for a VPN when it comes to security.
Am I missing something here?
This is exactly right. A VPN for a home user is simply obscuring non-encrypted traffic and DNS queries from their ISP, that's it. You are just moving the egress point of that traffic from the WAN interface on your router to some virtual switch port on somebody else's hardware and assuming nobody is sniffing that traffic, versus the hops it traverses from your ISP-provided equipment to its destination. It does nothing to further improve traffic that is already end-to-end encrypted.