I’m often told that a site I want to visit is unsecure, so I don’t go and am left curious. Let’s say I go to a site that doesn’t have https, but I only go to browse. I’m not knowingly entering any personal information, what would I be at risk of?
I’m often told that a site I want to visit is unsecure, so I don’t go and am left curious. Let’s say I go to a site that doesn’t have https, but I only go to browse. I’m not knowingly entering any personal information, what would I be at risk of?
That the traffic is intercepted and anything that you type in such as passwords or credit cards is stolen, that the content you see is discovered by a third party (ie. Someone finds out you’ve been reading X specific content on the website) or that the data is altered in flight and injected with false links or other false information.
It’s usually no big deal to visit an “unsecure website” for informational purposes if you don’t type in any sensitive info.
Generally speaking treat it like a postcard where everything you write could be read or altered by “mail employees” or other third parties.
If I’m using a well-established commercial VPN, would they be able to know my IP or anything else to show others I’ve used this site?
I’m screening a list of public websites sites for someone. So far, they’re all unsecure, so I haven’t gone to any of them.
Using a vpn in this case would hide some info from the site like your IP address. They would only see the IP of the vpn provider instead of your IP assigned to you by your ISP. However, traffic between you and the site is still unencrypted. As others have mentioned, as long as you don’t enter sensitive info while browsing these sites you should be okay.