ExpressVPN bought by ad company

I hope that Crossride/Kape has really changed its ways, otherwise it will be the death knell for ExpressVPN.

It will become the McDonald’s of VPN services: “Do you want ads with that?”

Kape used to be known as Crossrider until it changed its name in 2018 to move away from its advert-slinging past and reinvent itself as a cybersecurity outfit. Crossrider was founded in 2011, and in 2012, billionaire Teddy Sagi took control of it for $37m.

In 2015, a joint study by the University of California, Berkeley and Google identified Crossrider as a major affiliate of ad injectors, including SuperFish that you may remember from the laptop adware fiasco.

Kape now owns VPN services CyberGhost VPN as well as ZenMate and Private Internet Access, and with ExpressVPN onboard, that apparently takes its subscriber count up to six million.

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For one billion?? So much value on a company with basically 0 assets.

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Well presumably they have a fair number of valuable IPv4 IP addresses…?

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Possibly, but I’d bet they are leased or owned by their service providers.

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This worries me as well. Hopefully they continue to get audited regularly.

:grimacing: