Seamless switching between VPN and Web Protection

Hello @Giryoku and thank you for posting your suggestions here 🙂

This has to do with how the two features are designed, as the Web Protection & VPN features from Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS cannot be used at the same time, but alternatively. This means that turning on Web Protection in the app will disconnect the VPN and vice versa. Once a VPN session is ended, you can turn on Web Protection.

Web Protection automatically blocks malicious websites. When a URL points to a known phishing or fraudulent website, or to malicious content such as spyware or viruses, the webpage is blocked, and an alert is shown. The same thing happens when installed apps try to access malicious domains. With Web Protection, you are protected from accessing dangerous, phishing, and fraudulent pages.

On the other hand, VPN encrypts the data that leaves your iOS device, giving you the benefit of a private network even while you’re on a public Wi-Fi from the airport, mall, café, or hotel. When connected to VPN, you can access websites that are restricted to certain countries and you hide your own IP address, offering your online search more anonymity. VPN only does so much to anonymize your online activities. It won’t protect you online.

Therefore, this behavior is not a dysfunction. Web Protection and VPN are two features designed for separate purposes: the first keeps you safe while browsing while the latter aims to provide internet anonymity.

Apart from this configuration, I think that an automatic switch was not implemented so far, because the developers wanted to give the end users more control over the functions and allow them to manage these features individually, according to their needs and preferences.

Nevertheless, I have noted your recommendation and will forward your feedback to our product teams for analysis.

Regards

You are most welcome and I am grateful for your appreciation.

This community is a place of true value, that encourages ideation and contribution and helps our users to make the best out of their Bitdefender antivirus 🙂

You have and excellent day as well!

Hello @jumpingthegreen,

When it comes to usage, VPN and Web Protection have different purposes and you should turn them on depending on your needs. For example, if you want to do some online transactions on your banking site while being connected to an airport or a mall WI-FI, you should turn on the VPN, to encrypt & anonymise all your traffic. If you are especially browsing on all kind of new sites that could look suspicious, then Web Protection would be of greater help, making sure that the domains you are accessing are not exposed to online threats (like malware, phishing, miner) by blocking access to dangerous pages.

Currently, an option to enable web protection automatically after a VPN session is not available, however, the iOS app can be set to remind you to turn on web protection whenever the VPN session is closed. You can find it in Settings -> Enable web protection notification.

Nevertheless, I think this makes a good feature request for the development teams to analyze and I'll send your feedback to them.

Regards

Further tests revealed that Web Protection is not reliable in this setup. It seems that under certain situations, it no longer blocks suspicious pages, for example on 'http' it does not behave as expected. Therefore, I can't really recommend this workaround, having the security standards and safety in mind.

It would have been quite the discovery and for sure it would be nice to have both running at the same time, but it appears that this is not possible for now, at least not in a secure way.

Regardless of the outcome, thank you once again for sharing your findings with us. The development teams will continue to investigate this scenario, since they found it very interesting.

Regards

Thank you! 😁

Flexx is right, there is no built-in way to do this. But the workarounds suggested above might do the job 😉

Regards