The use of a VPN product can increase your online privacy by creating a digital tunnel between your computer and the services you use online. This tunnel encrypts your data so that third parties cannot understand it. This is desirable particularly when accessing services that are not already protected by HTTPS, which is provides similar benefits without the need to subscribe to and install a commercial VPN application.
Examples of commercial VPN providers include ExpressVPN, and NordVPN.
These commercial VPN services differ from the FortiGate Client VPN provided by Fullerton College for remote work. The VPN service provided by Fullerton College is primarily utilized to provide you access to internal, on-site services while working remote - and is not intended to be used to provide privacy while accessing services on the internet.
Accessing Fullerton College’s Office 365 systems including Email, Teams, and SharePoint, and the district’s systems such as MyGateway already have encrypted access utilizing Secure HTTP protocols and are safe to use without a VPN. The FortiGate Client VPN is only needed when accessing local on-site resources such as Remote Desktop, or SARS.
Threat actors, hackers, and malicious users commonly use VPN services to hide their identities when accessing services online. Many of the threat actors that have attempted to attack IT resources within NOCCCD utilize the same VPN providers that are used by every day users. As a result, the automated security measures utilized across the district will frequently initiate security alerts when VPN services are used to access our systems. These alerts can trigger both automated and manual processes to lockdown accounts and services that were being accessed via VPN.
If you utilize a VPN service such as other than FortiClient VPN while accessing Fullerton College, or other NOCCCD resources, your account may be locked while our IT teams investigate if the access is legitimate or a malicious threat actor attempting to compromise your account. This investigation can be lengthy, and disruptive to your ability to utilize your account.
We advise against using personal VPN services when accessing Fullerton College, or NOCCCD resources.
If you choose to continue to use VPN, we highly recommend that you always use the same VPN server or exit point such as the Los Angeles server: https://nordvpn.com/servers/usa/losangeles/ Consistently using the same VPN location will allow our security systems to associate that location with your account. Selecting other locations, outside of California, or outside of the United States will generally be considered abnormal by the security monitoring systems and will trigger alerts and lockdowns.