80 PCWorld APRIL 2020REVIEWS NORDVPN
NordVPN is owned by
Tefincom S.A., which is a
company based in Cyprus.
Tefincom doesn’t have a
website, and may be little
more than a shell. Multiple
reference websites,
including a whois listing,
name a Marios Papaloizou
as a representative for
Tefincom. I asked NordVPN
to confirm if Papaloizou was
a founder or owner of
NordVPN. The company
said Papaloizou is a former
director for Tefincom but is
neither a founder nor the owner of NordVPN.
The company also told us that the
founders can easily be found on LinkedIn (a
claim we disagree with), and “at the moment
they prefer to avoid public attention.” The
company also told us that transparency is a
focus for NordVPN in 2020, and the
situation with the founders will change in the
coming months.
NordVPN’s privacy policy says it has a
“strict no-logs policy,” meaning it does not
store time stamps, session information, used
bandwidth, traffic logs, IP addresses, and so
on. A third-party audit in 2018 confirmed this,
and NordVPN tells us another audit is planned
for 2020.
NordVPN also plans to follow in the path
of VPNs such as OVPN (go.pcworld.com/ovpn) and ExpressVPN (go.pcworld.com/
xvpn) by running diskless production servers.
Currently, NordVPN has about half of its
network running this way. Diskless servers
don’t store any information on them at all.
They are controlled and booted from a
remote server and everything then runs in
RAM. That makes it mighty difficult to pull any
user data from these servers. NordVPN says it
plans to go diskless for its entire server
infrastructure within three to four months.
Another step NordVPN took to increase
trust is joining the VPN Trust Initiative, an effort
that includes ExpressVPN, Golden Frog (of
VyperVPN fame), SaferVPN, Surfshark, Strong
VPN, and IP Vanish. The VPN Trust Initiative’s
(go.pcworld.com/vtrs) goal is to strengthen
trust and mitigate risk for VPN users.Landing page for the VPN Trust Initiative.