VPN security risks

[sselman]

Here is the situation:

A company has an office in NY and one in LA. Both sites have a T1 (serial/PPP) to ATT. If a GRE tunnel was established between the 2 sites, is it possible to packet sniff the traffic unless you are on ATT's backbone?

[gmiiller]

Without knowing ATT's infrastructure, the short answer is probably not.

Having said that, if you ask any carrier whether their network or VPN is secure, they will say yes, but these are the same carriers who told you that analogue mobiles were secure.

In other words, Secure VPN = VPN + ENCRYPTION, do you need a secure VPN, or just a VPN?

[sselman]

Our company does not send any data that is of any importance to anyone else. Who really cares about how many cases of product was sold in a region.... Because of this, it doesn't seem like the overhead on the routers to encrypt the data is work the time and money if the chances of someone sniffing the packets are remote anyhow....