Year in review — our report looks back at 2020

Cybercrime, censorship, and COVID

2020 brought us three unpleasant C’s: cybercrime, censorship, and Covid. The global Covid pandemic sparked a wave of cybercrime, with criminals exploiting new security risks created by home-working. Nord Security responded with the Stay safe campaign by providing 6 months of free NordVPN, NordPass, and NordLocker to nonprofits, creators, and educators suffering from the pandemic.

Censorship was rampant. We received over 7,000 Emergency VPN requests from human rights activists and journalists due to extreme restrictions of online freedom.

But we didn’t want to just react to the problems of today, when we could proactively combat tomorrow’s challenges. We wanted to build a better future. That’s why we focused on women in cybersecurity. We partnered with three women’s organizations that work in the field: Women4Cyber, WiCyS, and WISP.

Introducing Nord Security

2020 wasn’t all doom and gloom. The year brought many improvements to our company and upgrades to our services.

We launched Nord Security, the umbrella brand for our cybersecurity products:

• NordVPN: the flagship of Nord Security, the world’s leading VPN.
• NordLayer: a VPN solution for businesses.
• NordPass: an intuitive password manager.
• NordLocker: a secure cloud solution.

Nord Security was a major step toward our goal of providing users with all the online security tools they need to stay safe.

Nord Security advisory board

Nord Security is assembling an advisory board of independent experts, including technology specialists, academics, and online security professionals.

The board will help us create future-focused security products while remaining direct and transparent in our messaging. Troy Hunt, the creator of haveibeenpwned.com, and Tammarrian Rogers, director of engineering in Snap, joined the board in 2020.

Service upgrades

For Nord products, 2020 was the year of major technical upgrades.

NordVPN launched NordLynx, a next-generation tunneling solution, which significantly increased the connection speed. We also introduced colocated servers, 10Gbps servers, and upgraded all our regular servers to RAM-based models.

NordPass implemented the Data Breach Scanner, a major new security feature, which now alerts our users if their data has appeared in a data leak. We equipped NordPass with additional security tools such as the Password Health feature, which identifies compromised, weak, or reused passwords in their NordPass vault.

We upgraded NordLocker to version 2.0, with improved workflow, search, drag-and-drop, change view, and home screen functions. We’re very proud of the crucial upgrade we’ve implemented — the encrypted cloud storage, which turned NordLocker from a file encryption tool into a secure cloud storage service.