How to Check if Your VPN Connection is Actually Encrypted

 

I recently subscribed to a VPN service for my personal use so that my Internet connection from home is completely encrypted. With all the spying and hacking revelations going on these days, I don’t mind having a little bit of extra security on my side just in case. Once I had installed the software on computer and connected to the VPN, it seemed to be working fine as far as I could tell.
However, being a techie person myself, I couldn’t just accept that everything was working without actually verifying that the encryption was enabled. So even though I hadn’t played around with a packet sniffer and protocol analyzer, I went ahead and downloaded a network utility that let me actually see the data being transferred back and forth from my computer.
I checked the connection when not connected to the VPN and captured some packets and then did the same thing when connected. Easily, I was able to see that the data being transferred was actually encrypted when being sent to the VPN. In this article, I’ll show you how you can verify if your connection is encrypted also.