On March 12, 2024, popular VPN provider IPVanish launched its anti-malware and monitoring tool, Threat Protection, along with split tunneling features in its virtual private network (VPN) app on a wide range of devices, including Windows, Mac, Android. iOS and Fire TV.
Gone are the days when one of the best VPN services could work by only encrypting Internet connections and spoofing IP addresses. As online threats become increasingly complex, VPNs must catch up and offer a multi-faceted level of protection. How else can they hope to protect you from cybercriminals and oppressive censorship?
Why you should use threat protection
“For more than a decade, we have provided essential tools to protect consumer privacy online,” said Subbu Sthanu, Chief Business Officer at IPVanish. Now, he said, the team also wants to protect users' online actions from malicious actors.
“Threat Protection is our response to the increase in threats our users face and the need to protect them from malicious and tracking sites,” Sthanu explained.
This new layer of defense uses advanced filtering techniques to monitor web traffic against potential threats. It also uses block lists to proactively filter unsafe sites. These, the provider stated, are updated in real time to ensure maximum protection.
“Our Threat Protection feature uses our proprietary cloud threat intelligence service, which uses machine learning along with artificial intelligence technology to categorize and classify links,” a spokesperson for the IPVanish team told me. “This service processes millions of links daily and provides real-time updates on the latest threats identified by our VIPRE enterprise security products.”
Gusset! 🛡️ Our Threat Protection feature stops malicious ads, trackers, and sites in their tracks. Available on all platforms. https://t.co/bkC87RiX3GMarch 12, 2024
So what are the benefits for you here?
Your browsing experience will be safer and faster as Threat Protection continues to filter third-party content before loading it to preserve data usage while blocking third-party cookies and tracking scripts. At the same time, it prevents you from accessing known malicious websites, including phishing schemes and sites with embedded malware, to further protect users and their data.
This new functionality now places IPVanish alongside more secure VPNs that already offer similar advanced protections, including our top picks NordVPN and ExpressVPN.
Why you should use split tunnels
However, the good news for IPVanish users doesn't end here.
After a successful beta period, the provider also launched a feature that Apple users have been waiting for a long time: split tunneling built into its Mac VPN app.
Split tunneling gives you more control over your VPN experience by allowing you to choose which traffic to route and which to exclude from your VPN network. This is quite useful as it allows you to access content, like your banking service for example, that would normally require a fixed IP address without the need to turn off your VPN software.
While IPVanish already offered the feature in its Windows, Android, iOS and Fire TV apps, it is now one of the few providers to have added it on Mac as well. Private Internet Access (PIA) was the first to bring back the split tunnel MacOS a few weeks ago after Apple suddenly removed it in 2021. However, the IPVanish team said that the work done by PIA did not influence its operations. “Consequently, we did not take advantage of it or take advantage of it,” a spokesperson told me.
You can now activate the threat protection and split tunneling features within the IPVanish VPN app on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Fire TV devices.
