Privacy and VPN - does employer's VPN still log activity when I am connected by wifi?

Question

A company I work for wanted to use a VPN client called Junos Pulse to connect to their file server.

I am on my personal computer, and connected to my personal wifi. I was not using their VPN for internet access, but rather just to access their files.

Would my internet activity have been sent to the company through VPN? Should I uninstall Junos Pulse altogether to preserve my privacy? Anything else I need to do to ensure I'm completely off this company's network?

I have already looked at this related question: Can my company access my computer via the VPN?

As well as some others around the web. I do understand that VPN clients will monitor your internet browsing but the part I don't understand is that in this case I wasn't using the VPN to access the net, I was still on my own wifi. So is this still the case for me?

Answer 1

Sign out of Junos to keep your traffic off their network, there is no need to uninstall the VPN client completely.

If you had signed in to Junos, it was routing all your network traffic through their VPN. Although you were on your own Wifi, when you logged in to Junos, it would have redirected all your traffic into their VPN.

There is a chance that they had configured the VPN client to use split-tunneling to minimize the traffic which was sent on their network. You'll have to ask their systems department to find out.

This is a link to a juniper datasheet, look under the features and benefits section.

Answer 2

The most likely case is that the VPN is setup to only send traffic to/from the private network's subnet. So normal web traffic would go through your normal network interface. While going to fileshare.company.net will resolve to a private network that is only reachable through the VPN.

Most companies don't want/force all of an employee's traffic through their VPN since this costs unnecessary bandwidth on their network. As @JekwA commented, this is called Split Tunneling.

Removing a VPN client is generally all that is needed to ensure that you no longer connect to a private network. Once uninstalled check to make sure that any virtual network interfaces are no longer available.

Linux Based: ifconfig

Windows Based: ipconfig /all

As long as there is no longer a virtual network interface listed with respect to the company's network you should be completely disconnected.

Answer 3

@raz is right, but would add:

• The DNS requests could be resolved on the company network, so the network admins can see you want the address of www.example.com, even if the traffic later is not routed through their network. (you can set up your VPN to so that the 'resolver' is on the other side of the tunnel, then the company can no longer see the DNS request.

• Even if traffic is routed through their network, as long as you visit only https-pages, they should only see the IP and Domain you connect to (SNI Means that not only the IP but also the Domain requested is in the clear).