VPNSecure Review

VPNSecure, also branded as VPN.S, is owned by VPNSecure Pty Ltd.

It was founded in Australia in 2010. Australia is one of the worst jurisdictions for a VPN service to be based in: it’s a member of the Five Eyes international intelligence-sharing alliance.

In addition to Australia’s mandatory data retention laws, the country recently passed controversial laws that force technology companies to give police and security agencies a backdoor to encrypted messages.

This poses a huge privacy issue for VPN companies incorporated in the country.

In February 2019, VPNSecure notified users that it was moving the company to Hong Kong.

The email we received said that the VPN service would soon operate under Lucro Corp Limited.

However, years on from that we still have no idea if that move actually took place. There is practically no information on VPNSecure’s ownership within its privacy policy (or the internet in general), with Australia still being the only country mentioned.

Lucro Corp does seem to be a shell company registered within Hong Kong, however it doesn’t have an official website or any information on the businesses it represents.

The lack of information combined with (what we presume to still be) an Australian jurisdiction is not good.

At first glance, VPNSecure’s privacy policy looks really promising:

• IP Address NOT logged
• Connection timestamp NOT logged
• Disconnect timestamp NOT logged
• Bandwidth used NOT logged
• DNS Requests NOT logged

But there’s a catch.

VPNSecure is a no-logs VPN until the government decides to intervene:

“VPNSecure Trust will not monitor you or your use of the service, including its contents unless VPNSecure Trust has reason to believe that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to legal requirements or comply with legal process.”

Knowing what we do about Australia’s intrusive privacy laws, that’s very concerning.

We asked VPNSecure what this might entail and the company’s managing director told us:

“If required by a court order then we would only capture the specific data that was outlined within the court order and no other details.”

According to the director, so far the company has not been required to do this, but VPNSecure can’t rule it out for the future.

What’s worse, VPNSecure has been forced to withdraw its warrant canary that it used to publish in order to inform users that it had not received any gag orders or warrants. This is due to an Australian law that came into effect in 2015 prohibiting the use of canaries.

Until VPNSecure moves its operations to a privacy-friendly jurisdiction and expands upon its privacy policy we can’t guarantee that it’s a truly private VPN service.

VPNSecure is neither the fastest nor the slowest VPN we’ve tested – it’s fairly average.

You can expect a 20% drop in download speeds when connected to a nearby server and a much greater slowdown on servers further afield.

If all you need a VPN for is protecting your browsing and some light streaming it’ll hold up nicely.

Upload speeds were much more impressive, dropping by just 6% on same-country connections – that’s great if you’re a gamer or spend a lot of time on video calls while working from home.

Here’s how VPNSecure performed connecting to other countries:

• US: 28Mbps (download) & 82Mbps (upload)
• Germany: 53Mbps (download) & 92Mbps (upload)
• Japan: 18Mbps (download) & 33Mbps (upload)
• Australia: 9Mbps (download) & 25Mbps (upload)

Those download speeds are poor – particularly when connecting to the East Coast of the US. If you don’t live near a SecureVPN server then your speeds will suffer.

If streaming is your number one reason for considering a VPN then VPNSecure is close the worst choice you could make.

There are no servers labeled for or dedicated to streaming, but we went through every server anyway: the only service we were able to gain access to was All 4 (any UK server will work).

We recorded an average of 4.6MiB/s while torrenting with VPNSecure, compared to 11.2MiB/s with no VPN connected.

Considering how respectable the standard download speeds VPNSecure produces are on local connections, this is a pretty large drop off.

Speed isn’t the main factor holding VPNSecure back for torrenting, though – it’s its terrible jurisdiction and inadequate logging policy.

While VPNSecure claims to maintain a no-logs service, the Australian authorities can demand user data as and when they please.

Not to mention Australia’s very strict torrenting laws.

VPNSecure comes with all the VPN basics: strong encryption, solid protocols, and a VPN kill switch.

There’s not much more to it, but those features alone provide enough security.

Firstly, the VPNSecure apps run on OpenVPN – the safest protocol you can use.

The apps come with three different ciphers to choose from: DES-CBC, AES-128, and AES-256. We strongly recommend AES-256 as it’s the industry standard and considered to be uncrackable.

VPNSecure’s kill switch feature (‘Disable Internet on disconnect’) is available for the Windows and macOS apps only, and it prevents your IP address from being exposed to your ISP or any snoopers in the event of a sudden VPN disconnection.

There’s also a feature within the settings menu that allows you to pick and choose which domains are to be routed through VPN tunnel, similar to split-tunneling.

VPNSecure has first-party DNS servers, and throughout our tests we found VPNSecure to be free of any IP, DNS, or WebRTC leaks:

There’s also an option to disable IPv6, which further prevents IP leaks.

VPNSecure’s desktop apps come with Stealth VPN, which is an obfuscation tool that scrambles OpenVPN traffic so that it is less easily detected by firewalls such as China’s.

However, it’s still not a surefire way to access all the blocked websites in the country: when we tested it on our Shanghai server it could not connect. No VPN connection means no uncensored internet.

Other users online shared a similar experience to us, with the most recent reviews saying it didn’t work:

China is the absolute hardest test for any VPN, though. We feel fairly confident that VPNSecure’s obfuscation tools will still work in other high-censorship countries like Turkey and Russia. They are also only available on desktop.

We’ve seen more robust online resources from VPNs but the 125 or so articles on VPNSecure’s website definitely have the potential to be helpful.

The majority either help with device setup, which is always appreciated, or address extremely specific technical issues.

VPNs removing their live chat service is always a shame, but our past experiences with VPNSecure’s were never great. If waiting a few more hours is the price to pay for much better, more accurate support, then it’s not a huge loss.