CyberGhost's Transparency Report 2015

Bucharest, January 27, 2016 (Newswire.com) - The transparency report aims to highlight insights of various requests to disclose the identity of CyberGhost’s users, even though the company does not keep logs. In the report, data is analyzed and correlated with different internal and external events to better understand the requests and the importance of privacy to CyberGhosts users.

The requests received by law enforcement agencies, police offices, and websites owners or individuals and law firms around the world have been grouped in three categories: DMCA complaints, police requests and malware activity complaints.

• Compared to the previous year, the number of DMCA requests has decreased with an average of -21% over the past 12 months, receiving an average of 1,318 requests per month.
• Although the user base has seen a growth of 60%, the number of received police requests has declined to -24% with an average of only 6 requests per month.
• On a global scale, the reported malicious activities in CyberGhost’s network have increased significantly with 310% from an average of 99 per month in 2014 to 407 per month in 2015. Substantial increases of malicious activities have been also reported by security companies such as Kaspersky Lab, Trend Micro, Cisco and Symantec. 

“Interestingly, censorship, governmental web filtering measures and mass surveillance reports have also influenced the usage of VPN. Whether democratic or nondemocratic countries, various legislation changes affect the online experience of users. We are thrilled to show how politics influences privacy and encourages actions to encrypt communications and anonymize the online presence”, said Robert Knapp, co-founder and CEO of CyberGhost VPN.

CyberGhost has taken several measures to reduce the number of abuses committed on the service such as analyzing the ports used for torrent streaming and blocking them in countries where specific laws exist. To stop malware activities, CyberGhost has blocked access to the attacked IP’s so any further attack would be impossible since most of the complaints are specifying the source of the attacks as well as the victim’s IP. These measures are also linked to the pressure put on datacenter owners by authorities and law firm representatives.

All the requests remain a confirmation of the fact that digital citizens are being watched and their data is considered to be automatically stored by ISP’s. “We believe that tech companies and industry leaders should address the privacy issue on a regular basis and take all the possible measures to protect the privacy of their users.” CyberGhost does not keep logs and is committed to defend the privacy of its users considering privacy a basic human right and the foundation of democratic societies.

The transparency report also includes data about US, German, UK, Pakistan and Turkey; censorship and its impact on VPN usage; influence of wealth on privacy in various regions of the world; encryption as a digital weapon in the 21st century and other relevant information about privacy. Download the complete Transparency report here: http://www.cyberghostvpn.com/en_us/transparency-report