- NordVPN has scored all positive results on a new independent audit
- West Coast Labs put the VPN’s reliability, speed, and security across key categories to the test
- NordVPN regularly undergoes security independent audits, with the latest occurring between June and August 2024
A new independent audit confirmed NordVPN as one of the best VPN services on the market, scoring positive results across all categories.
Experts at West Coast Labs tested NordVPN’s reliability, speed, and security across key metrics, according to the guidelines of the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO) group.
“Independent testing is one of the most honest measures of our work. This evaluation confirms that NordVPN delivers strong security while maintaining high levels of speed and usability – a result we’re proud to stand behind,” says NordVPN CTO Marijus Briedis.
NordVPN audit results – performance and security
As mentioned earlier, experts at West Coast Labs have executed a series of tests to confirm that NordVPN delivers satisfactory performance and security levels. These are:
- VPN functionality. During this round of tests, experts verified that some of the provider’s key features work correctly and consistently. These are auto-launch on boot, auto-connect, split tunneling, and the kill switch. The latter is especially crucial for users’ security.
- Speed performance. A series of speed tests were also conducted across seven regions (the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, East Asia, and Australia). NordVPN delivered 15.2% faster downloads, 12.4% faster uploads, and 7.9% lower latency.
- Website accessibility. The provider scored a 100% website accessibility across the 100 most visited sites, with minimal CAPTCHA occurrences.
- VPN system impact. Tests show a minimal impact on system performance during browsing when connected to NordVPN software.
- VPN time to connect and success. NordVPN scored an average connection time of 1.67 seconds across the 10 locations tested.
- Security and leak protection. NordVPN successfully passed all eight leak scenarios that experts tested, such as IP address, DNS, WebRTC, and IPv6 leak checks. The evaluation also included two advanced cases – a split-tunneling flaw and the TunnelVision attack.
You can find the full West Coast Labs report here.
Commenting on the findings, Briedis said: “This evaluation reflects the work we’ve put into making NordVPN fast, reliable, and secure. We design it to work quietly in the background – quick to connect, light on system resources, and ready to protect across a range of scenarios, including those that test for serious vulnerabilities like TunnelVision. It’s good to see those goals confirmed.”
NordVPN is known for regularly putting its VPN software under independent scrutiny.
Last March, the provider published the results of its latest security audit that occurred between June and August 2024. On that occasion, experts uncovered 31 non-critical findings, with most of them already fixed at the time of publication.
In February 2025, NordVPN also confirmed its no-log claims with an independent audit for the fifth time since 2018.
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