IPVanish in 2026 Talks About Threat Protection, Privacy-First Infrastructure, and Staying Ahead of Online Risks
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Key Takeaways
- IPVanish is strengthening its 2026 VPN offering with continuous Threat Protection and proactive malware scanning to keep users safer online.
- Its strict no-logs infrastructure ensures that even if a server is compromised, no user activity or identifying information can be recovered.
- IPVanish provides optional traffic obfuscation and alternative routing to help users bypass censorship and selective blocking.
- The company is focusing on mature, well-established protocols like WireGuard® and OpenVPN while incrementally improving performance and stability.
- IPVanish limits operational monitoring to short-lived, non-identifying data, maintaining a privacy-first approach.
As online threats evolve and censorship, malware, and sophisticated surveillance grow more prevalent, protecting user privacy is becoming increasingly challenging. For IPVanish, 2026 is about helping users stay safer in the real-world parts of their online activity while maintaining a strict privacy-first approach.
In our conversation with Subbu Sthanu, Chief Commercial Officer at IPVanish, he shared how the company is expanding Threat Protection with page-level analysis and proactive malware scanning. Instead of treating privacy and security as optional add-ons, IPVanish builds them directly into the network and client experience.
The company also reinforces its strict no-logs infrastructure, ensuring that even if a server were compromised, no user activity or identifying information could be recovered. At the same time, optional traffic obfuscation and alternative routing help users bypass censorship or selective blocking without compromising privacy.
This interview takes a closer look at IPVanish’s plans for 2026 and how the company is preparing to protect users in high-risk environments. By focusing on proactive security, privacy-first design, and reliable connectivity, IPVanish aims to deliver a VPN service that is safe, dependable, and resilient as online risks continue to grow.
Rachita Jain: What is the main technical goal your VPN is pursuing in 2026, and what concrete changes, such as new features, cryptographic mechanisms, or architectural shifts, are you launching to achieve it? Why is this necessary now?
The main goal in 2026 is helping users stay safer during the parts of their online activity where most real-world dangers actually occur.
While encryption protects data in transit, many risks come from malicious pages, downloads, or links users encounter while browsing. To address that, the focus is on making Threat Protection more continuous and precise, moving beyond broad-domain blocking to page-level analysis and proactively scanning downloads for malware and ransomware.
Rachita Jain: Which specific lessons from past VPN breaches, audits, or law-enforcement cases are directly shaping your 2026 architecture, product design, or feature roadmap? What decisions would you not have made five years ago?
Subbu Sthanu: Since Ziff Davis acquired IPVanish in 2019, our top priority has been our users' privacy and security. Every change, every integration, and every partnership must comply with our strict requirements, including our no-logs policy. As a result, we don’t have any ‘regrets’ on past decisions, and we also don’t need to radically change direction or policy, because it’s always been consistent; we won’t risk our users’ safety at any time.
Rachita Jain: If one of your VPN servers were compromised today, what user information could realistically be inferred, and how do the concrete changes planned for 2026, including infrastructure or feature changes, further reduce that exposure?
No user activity or identifying information could be inferred if any of our VPN servers were compromised.
The service is designed so that servers do not store logs or data that could be tied back to individual users. Schellman Compliance, LLC also verified this after conducting a thorough, independent review of our no-log VPN operations in 2025.
Rachita Jain: Are you planning any protocol-level changes or departures in 2026, beyond OpenVPN or WireGuard, or any significant modifications to how these protocols are used? What limitations of current protocols are driving those decisions?
Subbu Sthanu: There are no major plans for new protocols in 2026. The focus remains on incremental improvements in performance, stability, and efficiency within the established standards of WireGuard®, OpenVPN, and similar protocols.
Rachita Jain: As censorship, deep packet inspection, and AI-driven traffic analysis improve in 2026, what specific techniques are you deploying to make VPN traffic harder to identify or classify, and are any of these changes user-configurable or enabled by default?Â
Subbu Sthanu: While VPN traffic can often be identified, encryption still prevents that traffic from being read, and identification alone hasn’t materially changed user security. When censorship or selective blocking occurs, the most effective responses remain traffic obfuscation and alternative routing features, which users can enable as needed to make VPN activity less visible on a network.
Rachita Jain: How are you changing abuse-prevention, fraud-detection, and operational monitoring systems in 2026 to avoid creating hidden logs, persistent identifiers, or long-lived behavioral profiles?
Subbu Sthanu: Abuse prevention and operational monitoring are designed to work within our existing no-logs model, not around it. Any system we deploy has to function without creating hidden logs or other persistent identifiers. If a control can’t be implemented without compromising user privacy or security, it simply doesn’t get deployed.
Rachita Jain: Some governments argue VPNs should help enforce age limits, content restrictions, or online-safety rules. What is your position on this in 2026? How does it influence your product, UI, or infrastructure decisions, and how do you prevent such systems from weakening user privacy?
Subbu Sthanu: We believe age limits and content rules are best handled by parents, platforms, or devices, not built into core privacy tools. VPNs are fundamentally designed to protect security and privacy, and turning them into enforcement mechanisms would require inspection or data collection that weakens those protections. From a product standpoint, that means avoiding designs that introduce identity checks or content monitoring. Parents should use security tools like ours to manage online safety at home, but those choices shouldn’t come at the expense of everyone else's privacy.
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