VPN is an acronym that stands for Virtual Private Network. A Virtual Private Network basically creates a direct connection to wherever you are trying to connect. A lot of remote workers will have a VPN that goes directly to their headquarters. Then when that worker is remote, they are actually directly connected to the office from their home office, or coffee shop. It also encrypts all of that traffic, so that if someone is eavesdropping they won't be able to tell what you're doing. You can think of it like a tunnel. If you setup a VPN, your have a direct tunnel into the headquarters network (or wherever) that can't be looked on from outside. In order to tell what's happening in the tunnel, you have to be in the tunnel.

There are also two main types of VPN's out there, one is a Full Tunnel VPN, and one is a Split Tunnel VPN, and these are important to understand as some popular VPN's are only split tunnel. A full tunnel VPN is going to take all of your network traffic, and put it in the tunnel of your VPN. A split tunnel, is only going to take the traffic that needs to go to your headquarters network (or wherever), and all the other traffic will go directly to the internet outside of the VPN. With a split tunnel, most of your traffic will act exactly like it would if there wasn't a VPN setup at all.

In this connection, all of your internet traffic goes through your local internet to whatever websites you're accessing. Not encrypted unless the website you access is (for example, if you see the "https" it's encrypted, but not if it says "http".

In this connection, all of your traffic is encrypted from the VPN on your computer, through your local internet connection, and then to your headquarters network, then to whatever websites your going to. The last leg (HQ internet to website) is not encrypted unless the website your connecting to has "https" setup. 

In this connection type, only traffic that needs to go to your headquarters network goes there. The rest of the connections go right out to the websites. This isn't really helpful from a security setting, but designed to allow your computer to get access to company resources while you are remote.

The risk of not using a VPN is mainly in untrusted networks where someone may be trying to either collect data on what you're doing, or redirect your browser with malicious intent. Remember too, your connections to "https" websites are still encrypted, so people can't see what you're doing there even if they are listening to your traffic or have setup a man-in-the-middle.

Places you may want one:

• Public Places
• Public Networks
• Networks without a password on them "Open" wifi networks
• Coffee Shops
• Airports
• Hotels
• When Traveling out of the country

The best solution to these networks, is just to hot spot from your phone, but if that's not an option then get a VPN.  

There are a lot of VPN options out there, so which one should you get? You'll have to decide that yourself, but here are some you may want to check out:

• Opera Web Browser (has a VPN built-in you can turn on) | https://www.opera.com/
• NordVPN | https://nordvpn.com/
• SurfShark | https://surfshark.com/