NordVPN vs Surfshark

The 2018 Finland datacenter breach was a third-party intrusion, not a law-enforcement seizure — recorded under P12_case_history as kind=breach, not P01_seizure_event. NordVPN's own account (nordvpn.com/blog/official-response-datacenter-breach/) and Bloomberg's contemporaneous coverage agree the disclosure followed Twitter allegations by outside researchers, not NordVPN's own initiative — hence third_party_disclosed rather than self_disclosed_late.

NordVPN and Surfshark share a parent (Nord Security) but both companies' own merger announcement states separate infrastructure and product roadmaps; M18 is set to separate on that basis.

This record was previously read twice — connection_timestamps in V11 from the audit wording, source_ip in C01 from the policy wording — and graded at the worse of the two, which made the fifteen-minute buffer cost more than saying nothing at all: a blank on C01 is the market prior 0.550 and source_ip is 0.750.

R29 now draws the line: state deleted within a declared window tied to the end of the session is the connection, not a record of it, so both fields read connection_timestamps on the same sentence. What is still charged is what outlives the session — the last login date in policy section 2.3.1 and the connection timestamps the auditor names.

Surfshark and NordVPN share a parent (Nord Security, since 2022) but Surfshark's own about-us page states the brands merged 'while operating independently' with separate infrastructure — M18 is set to separate on that basis, mirroring the nordvpn.com record.

U12a is partial rather than yes on the server table's own P2P column: 88 of the 100 listed countries carry it and twelve do not (AU, CL, CO, HR, GR, IE, JP, MX, NZ, TW, TR, AE). The column is drawn client-side, so it was read off the rendered table rather than the static HTML, where every row carries every label.

The transparency report at /transparency-report — which is where /warrant-canary now redirects — carries the April-June 2026 quarter as a table: 374,719 DMCA notices, 33 inquiries from government institutions, 1 warrant, 0 national security letters and 0 gag orders. P08 counts the 34 legal requests and leaves the DMCA notices out: those are copyright complaints about traffic, not requests for a user's data.

The same page states Surfshark is retiring its warrant canary in favour of quarterly reporting, which is why P07 is removed rather than none — the canary existed and was withdrawn deliberately.

U07_protocols carries proprietary for Dausos on Surfshark's own word — its protocol page calls Dausos "Surfshark's proprietary protocol" and publishes no source for it — and that single value is what sets C13_weakest_protocol and the hygiene charge that follows. IKEv2 is kept because Surfshark still documents it, though its own blog records the removal from the Windows app; Shadowsocks is gone from the support index and is not listed.

The canary, and the quarter that replaced it. The same page retired the warrant canary (P07=removed) for quarterly transparency reports; the latest complete quarter (Apr–Jun 2026) shows 85 government inquiries and 0 disclosures, so P08/P09 are that period, not the lifetime figure.

India, and the secret-order regime. P04=withdrew_physical is the June 2022 India exit. P11=none_known rests on the page's statement that NordVPN has received no binding National Security letters or gag orders and on Panama's absence of such a regime.

An assurance level nobody can check. NordVPN describes the Deloitte Lithuania engagement as a reasonable assurance engagement under ISAE 3000 (Revised), which would be the stronger form; PIA's report, which can be read, states a limited assurance conclusion.

Why the stronger form is not credited. The model now prices that difference, and this record does not get the benefit of it: V15_assurance_strength is unknown because the only statement of the level is NordVPN's own, about a report nobody outside a Nord Account can open. A document behind a login is not evidence here at any level, so the engagement is credited at the market norm rather than at the level it is said to have reached.

A report behind a login. The report itself is readable only after signing in to a Nord Account, so nobody outside that relationship has checked its scope, and every audit field here rests on NordVPN's own summary of it rather than on the document. That, and not a finding against the service, is why this record is the thinnest in the catalogue.

The owner fields. M11_owner_jurisdiction and X04_owner_group_history are unknown: nordvpn.com and nordsecurity.com name Nord Security as owner but neither states Nord Security's own jurisdiction of incorporation or any prior record for the group; secondary press ties a 'Cyberspace' holding entity to the Netherlands from the 2022 merger, but that was not confirmed against a primary Nord Security or NordVPN page in the time available.

What could not be read at all. The full text of the 2025 Deloitte report cannot be read at all (login-gated), so no retention finding is recorded beyond the policy's own claim in C01_linkable_retention.

The server table that would not open. C09b_mandate_hosting is unknown: the live per-country server table shows physical/virtual status only for the Americas region in the accordion state this audit could render; Europe, Asia-Pacific and Africa/Middle East sections (which include several mandate countries the fleet serves, e.g. AE, IN, TR, VN, IQ, KZ per the servers API) load client-side on click and were not expanded.

Left unknown rather than asserted. C04-C07, U06 (censorship proof), U11, V12-V14, X06, X07, X10 and X11 were not independently confirmed against a primary document and are left unknown rather than asserted from secondary coverage.

One doubt left open, and not charged. One doubt stays open on X12 without being charged: the Play data safety form for com.nordvpn.android declares Installed apps under analytics on Android, while the NordVPN privacy notice mentions installed applications in one place only — the anti-malware vulnerability scan — and scopes the processing of application names and versions to Windows.

Why it still reads as a match. The category is disclosed rather than absent, and R28 does not make a finding out of a platform scope difference, so the value reads matches_policy; but the Android purpose is not the one the notice describes, and only NordVPN can say which of the two is written wrong.

India, and the secret-order regime. P04_mandate_response=withdrew_physical is the June 2022 India exit, restored from Surfshark's own blog (surfshark.com/blog/surfshark-servers-certin-india) after the earlier run found the /trust-center page no longer carried it. P11=judicial_only rests on the transparency report showing the April 2026 Amsterdam District Court warrant and its National-Security-letter and gag-order counters at zero.

Two reports found, maybe not all. Only two Deloitte no-logs reports (Dec 2022, Jun 2025) were found published; there may be others not linked from robots.txt that this audit did not search for by other means.