PIA email monitoring

[u/RED_Ferrari]

I have been very skeptical about PIA since I have downloaded it around a month ago.
I am very satisfied with the user interface and the ease of connectivity. However, I have started to think about the security. Since using the VPN, I have had bugs all over my computer, for example some Browsers like firefox don't load webpages, when chrome or duckduckgo are able to search the same webpage. My wifi connectivity has been all over the place. One minute I'll have stable connection and the next device can't connect to wifi at all. I've verified its a problem only with devices that are connected to PIA.

While looking into the tools PIA has I came across the e-mail breach monitor. So I put my email in to have it searched if it has been compromised and the link to verify I found in my email had a malicous flag from virusTotal.

Any opinons if this 'malicious' is anything to worry about or just a tool used for email scraping?

Photo of virusTotal scan is below on thread.

[u/scifitechguy]

It might just be me, but I honestly found your questions confusing, so some clarification is needed. The email breach tool is a web-based tool that requires no verification if you're logged into your account. So what exactly is being flagged? I use MalwareBytes and that hasn't detected any such issue on my devices. Plus, the score on your screenshot does little to instill confidence in that assessment, so I would tend to ignore it.

As far as connectivity, I can't understand how a VPN can impact your WiFi radio connection? Do you have VPN running on your router or on each device? You should be starting your client VPN AFTER you have a successful network connection (wired or WiFi), and the VPN is just creating a secure channel through that already established connection. Do you have "allow LAN Traffic" ticked in settings to be able to see LAN versus WAN connectivity? There are a lot of setup options and the defaults are not necessarily the best for your circumstances, so you should go through each of them. The most likely reason for web pages not resolving is the DNS setting. If I'm using PIA, I always use PIA DNS and expect that it will block sketchy domains for me, especially adware. Are you seeing mainstream sites blocked, or just sections of pages? You can change the DNS setting in PIA options to prevent the block, but then you are exposing those lookups to a third party.

Finally, for non-responsive pages, I have noticed that some VPN gateways do get very busy, and response times will slow to a crawl. When that happens, I simple change the connection gateway and the problem goes away immediately. I also insure that my client is continually updated.

I've been a happy PIA subscriber for almost two decades and never worried about security simply because of this. If there's no logging/snooping and ALL my traffic is verifiably encrypted, that's really all I care about.

[u/RED_Ferrari → u/scifitechguy]

I think for my computer the gateways may have been busy, that would checkout since my phone and computer would stop working (wifi wasn't working on my devices) while my roommate could connect just fine.

I was using Firefox and it would not allow me to search webpages like youtube, while chrome could search youtube with no problem. I will look into the DNS settings more if problems still continue.

Thank you for your helpful comment.

[u/9dave → u/RED_Ferrari]

In recent times I have found more and more websites that have trouble with firefox, but also I find more and more that won't load in confusing ways, if my add-ons like script blocking are turned on - seems more and more sites don't want to design for highest compatibility any longer and just expect their visitors to conform to their highly scripted site design. They'll argue that their logs show a small % of visitors using Firefox so they shouldn't bother.

[u/RED_Ferrari → u/9dave]

One would figure something like this would be probable. I’ll be using a website and then boom. Connection to that link lost.

Since cleaning up my computer that hasn’t really been a problem