Insufficient

CyberGhost VPN

Commercial VPNRomaniaRank 9 of 68

Paying monthly

$12.99 per month

Paying yearly

— no yearly plan

Coverage

91 countries with an exit

Free tier

No paid plans only

21 out of 100

Security

69 out of 100

Usability

Visit site

Service class

Commercial VPN — security leads

Security score

21 of 100 · Insufficient

Usability score

69 of 100 · state known · 92% established · 85.3% of the weight read

Legal entity

CyberGhost S.R.L.

Jurisdiction

Romania

Ultimate owner

Teddy Sagi, sole owner of Unikmind Holdings Limited (Isle of Man), which holds Kape Technologies plc — CyberGhost's parent

Exposure

Medium · dominant channel: retention

Retention

Aggregate counts only

Latest audit

Deloitte Audit S.R.L. (Deloitte Audit Romania) · 19 Dec 2025 · Repeated, at no fixed interval · unknown

Countries with exits

Protocols

WireGuard OpenVPN IKEv2

Works under active censorship

unknown

Weakest protocol still offered

not applicable

Own DNS inside the tunnel

unknown

Platforms

Windows macOS Linux Android iOS Android TV Fire TV Routers Browser extension

Simultaneous devices

Kill switch

On some platforms

Split tunnelling

Available

Signing up

An email address only

Free tier

No free tier

P2P allowed

Allowed

Major streaming services reachable

Reachable

Price, monthly

$12.99 per month

Price, yearly

not published

Offered countries that sit under a logging mandateC09_mandate_countries

United Arab Emirates China India Iran Kazakhstan Turkey Vietnam

Country of the ultimate beneficial ownerM11_owner_jurisdiction

Owner group cluster keyM15_owner_group

kape

Date the current owner took controlM16_control_since

2017-03

Role of this brand inside the groupM17_brand_role

acquired_brand

Infrastructure shared with cluster siblingsM18_shared_infrastructure

unknown

Total published auditsV10_audit_count

Where the security score comes from

Eight channels, each asking one question of the published record and reading a named set of fields to answer it. They multiply rather than add — the factor beside a channel is what is left after the pressure it found, and open a channel to see every field it read, as it is stored. How the model works

Security fields

67 55 of them feed a channel

Established

51 15 left unknown, 1 not applicable

Completeness

76% the share the model could weigh

Citations

66 across 18 documents

Every value carries what it rests on, and the model weighs the four levels differently. Weight, then how many citations on this record sit at that level:

A weighs 1.00 · 13 hereB weighs 0.85 · 52 hereC weighs 0.70 · 1 here

The weights are methodology.json’s own; a claim seen in the artefact itself counts for more than the same claim reported second-hand. The date at the end of a row is the day that value was last read.

A channel does not price every field it reads. The ones it did are marked along their edge and carry what they added; everything else was read and cost nothing. Only a channel that composes field by field can mark a field at all — the rest price themselves by the parameters printed above their rows.

Still open on this record.

Owner-group history. Kape Technologies, CyberGhost's parent since March 2017, traces back to Crossrider, an ad-injection SDK platform whose services were widely abused by adware and malware distributors before the 2016 pivot to VPNs. No documented lie or claim gap ties this history to CyberGhost's own conduct, but the adverse record is why this provider is catalogued at all rather than by a neutral selection rule.

Scale and reach are undocumented. No CyberGhost-specific user count could be sourced from the provider's own pages beyond "millions of customers," so M08_user_scale stands unknown, and no clean 12-month plan exists to price against U04b_price_yearly — CyberGhost sells only 1-month, 6-month and 26-month terms.

the rest of what is open — 160 more words

Client and build transparency are unexamined. No official CyberGhost source-code repository, reproducible-build attestation or standalone application pentest (Cure53's public index has no entry for CyberGhost or Kape) could be found, leaving V12, V13 and V14 unknown rather than a finding either way.

A disputed breach claim was not independently resolvable. A September 2024 third-party report alleged leaked CyberGhost account credentials; CyberGhost's own response denies a service-side compromise and attributes the credentials to user-side malware, but the underlying report could not be read in this session, so X09_incident_handling stays unknown rather than taking either side's account.

Two of CyberGhost's own pages disagree on its street address: the imprint names 70-72 Dionisie Lupu street, the privacy policy names 68 Polonă street, both in the same Bucharest district and both current pages rather than one being an archived leftover. Neither was treated as authoritative over the other, and the discrepancy is left for a future refresh to resolve rather than guessed at here.

On the record as a whole.

Deloitte's third no-logs assurance report (the only one of three published as a full downloadable PDF rather than gated behind login or an email request to Deloitte) is a limited assurance, ISAE 3000 (Revised) engagement dated as of 31 October 2025 and signed 19 December 2025; it examines CyberGhost's description of its own no-logging controls on a sample basis, not the full fleet, and its conclusion is negative assurance ("nothing has come to our attention"), not a positive finding of no logs.

The privacy policy's non-personal-data list names the Google Advertising ID and gyro-sensor data under website-style language that only a mobile app can actually read.

RetentionDoes a record exist that links traffic to a person, and who checked?13 fields read · 45.0 points of pressure×0.550

Composed rather than added: a prior of 0.55 on the stated branch, moved by what the paper says (0.5935) and by what the practice shows (0.0), at credence 0.5935 from the audit and 0.85 from how the provider engaged, against a severity of 0.08 for what is actually retained.

Retention linkable to a person as declaredmaterialC01_linkable_retention

aggregates_only

Bcyberghostvpn.com13 Sep 2026

Report a problem with C01_linkable_retention

Persistent device identifier the provider holdsC12_device_identifier

resettable_ad_id

Bcyberghostvpn.com13 Sep 2026

Report a problem with C12_device_identifier

At least one independent auditmaterialV01_audit_exists

yes_verified

Adownload.cyberghostvpn.com19 Dec 2025

Report

Computed

×0.212 of a clean record completeness 76%

Where the drop comes from: Retention. It is the channel this record's risk is concentrated in — on its own it takes a clean record to ×0.550, and its bar above is filled to that.

Exposure is recorded as medium and the integrity status as clean.

This record sits above the register's average on all 8 channels. The narrowest margin is Integrity, ×0.675 against ×0.658.

Published score

Every row above is one field of the published record, and every one of them can be challenged: every row carries Report, or raise something about the record as a whole. A correction with a source behind it is made the same day, and if it moves the score it moves the rank.

Specification

Carried, never scored

Countries with an exit

If this one is not right

Compared with

CyberGhost VPN

Proton VPN

Mullvad VPN

IVPN

Where the security score comes from