Hi, my corporate employer loans me a laptop which I must use, via their vpn, to access company systems and data.
Without installing any software on the laptop, how can I hide my location or “spoof” my location so I can work from another country with no issues?
Thanks
Jim
Lying to your employer sounds like a terrible idea, but… you could set up a router, or another computer with a VPN and tunnel through that. You’d need a bit of knowledge of networking and there’s a risk of something failing and exposing your location.
I did it for a coupla months in Mexico via VPN router. It was kinda stressful.
I happen to have a big nest egg in savings and don’t care at all about my current employer. If I cared about the job at all, I wouldn’t take the risk.
Short answer is that you need a VPN to anonymize your traffic. The easiest solution is obviously to install it directly on the computer that you are using, but you can also configure another computer to act as the VPN bridge and then you configure your work computer to use it as it’s network gateway. There are ready made routers that will act as VPN gateways for all machines on the LAN, typically commercial grade devices that will cost a bit more than your consumer grade 5-ports switch. OpenWRT supports it so Linksys WRT family of wifi routers are usable, but you will need to overwrite the factory OS and install OpenWRT. You will also need an account with a VPN service provider, which could be yourself if you have a machine running in the cloud in a location that seems plausible for your purpose.
Performance will suffer. You will probably double VPN (yours+company one) so expect high latency.
Does it not already have a vpn installed? Every work laptop I’ve ever had has one
Not to sound like a dick but if you have to ask, your chances of successfully fooling your employer are low.
I just mean that technology is very tricky. People here are giving you advice on getting a VPN and as u/y_gingras points out, this may not actually do anything to hide your location.
Honestly, if I was your employer, I can already think of a few ways to catch this which I doubt many of the people who have commented so far are even aware of.
For instance, has your employer installed geolocation software on the computer? Wait, there’s no GPS in my laptop, right? You’re right. There isn’t.
But you have Wifi. And companies like Google map Wifi networks all over the world.
In other words, you know when Google drives those little cars around and gets Street View pictures of most of the streets around the world? They also map all of the Wifi networks they pass by too.
When you click on that little Wifi icon and you see a list of all of the WiFi networks near you, Google creates maps based on these known Wifi networks.
Even if you don’t connect to any of those other Wifi networks, the fact that your computer can see other Wifi networks around it tells Google approximately where you are because they know where those other WiFi networks are.
They can use the signal strength to know you’re closer to this network than that network and you’re getting a really strong signal from another known network, so you must be within 10 meters of this exact spot.
Google sells that data to geolocation tracking firms. Those firms then provide a variety of services to businesses that need to know the exact location of a computing device.
If your employer is one of those businesses, they could easily know your exact location. It could be tracking you in the background and reporting your location to your employer.
Even if they don’t want to pay for a sophisticated system like that, they could always just install a little agent that runs in the background and periodically reports back to the company where the computer is.
So, you try to be all careful and only connect to your employer via VPN to disguise your location but when you were surfing YouTube videos 20 minutes before you used the VPN, your computer called home and told them what ISP you were connected to.
Is this common? No. But you haven’t said who your employer is. If it’s someone like Google or Northrup, yeah, they’re probably tracking where their computers are. If it’s Bob’s Hardware Store, probably not.
BTW, a company I used to work for used to have a tracking feature and they had remote management software installed on all computers that let them monitor what I was installing on the computer and god knows what else.
As soon as they issued me the computer, I wiped the hard drive clean and did a fresh OS install (fortunately they didn’t mess with the bios). I got a phone call a few days later asking what happened to their computer.
LOL
Most corporations have policies in place that monitor that kind of thing for a reason. Some businesses ask that you submit requests for international travel so they can safeguard their intellectual property and sensitive data. My company even has a list of countries we’re not allowed to travel to let alone take a corporate device and work from there. What if you lost your device or if your network was hacked and your data was leaked in transit? You could lose your job and they may even press charges for theft. Heck, I’d be considering insider risk at that point and you’d be hosed. But, YOLO. Good luck with that.
Along with the advice about a personal VPN (connected via a separate device acting as a network bridge) that other users have given you, you’ll need to be sure that your employer hasn’t installed any monitoring software on your laptop. All the VPNs in the world won’t save you if there’s auditing software phoning home about your location to your employer. (The right hardware VPN setup can protect you against this, assuming you never connect the laptop to a network except via the hardware bridge and the laptop has no LTE / GPS capabilities).
You only need to mess up once to be caught, there’s a lot you need to watch out for (and you need to be pretty aware of the IT issues involved), and the consequences could be severe- I strongly recommend against going behind your employer’s back to work from outside the country unless you don’t care about being fired and possibly blackballed.
Not worth it. If you have strict policies do not risk it. Corporate hugely care about their IP.
If the company owns the laptop they can prolly track your location so nothing u can do. Also if u get work email on ur phone they may know if u leave the country.
Router with openvpn and a killswitch to shutdown the connection if the vpn loses connectivity
I’ve been doing this for a long time and works perfectly! Also my NordVPN app on my computer as long as I connect to it first, I can connect to my second work VPN as long as it is half-pipe. Do some research on this, but totally possible. Best of luck!
The VPN software pre-installed by the company is to have a secure link to the company, not to anonymize the traffic. It will work to hide your traffic from anyone except the company where you set your tunnel to. OP will therefore need two VPNs.
Not OP but i was wondering about this too. Does the VPN hide your IP address though? I use my home router to connect to the internet, then VPN into the company’s intranet. I assumed they’d still be able to see where I am accessing the VPN from. The OS seems to treat it as a wired connection to the company’s network but it still has to maintain connection through my own IP address. Or does that VPN obfuscate the log-in locale?
These are all technical problems that can be solved, I worked on this for undergraduate. But you’re right, most people don’t have the skill to pull it off.
First level difficulty. Disabling wifi on the machine and only using an ethernet VPN. Still vulnerable to GPS.
Second level difficulty, solves GPS issue. Completely reroute IO to/from the target machine and leave it in a safe location. Generally your laptop has a few IO devices which you need. Keyboard, mouse, display, audio, microphone.
Third level difficulty. Blackbox the machine so it disconnects from any GPS networks.
Fourth level difficulty. Completely emulate the entire system. Possibility when?
Your device connects to a VPN gateway using its own IP. The gateway knows your laptop’s IP. The gateway then retransmits the laptop’s traffic onto your company’s intranet using its own IP address. So your company knows your IP because the gateway is logging your IP. The internal services on your corporate intranet you’re connected to see the IP of the gateway.
Very true. And a great recap of the various approaches.
But I go back to my original comment, if you have to ask, you’re probably going to get caught if your employer is serious about monitoring the location.
I’ve seen guys beat geolocation but they actually understand how their geolocation is tracked and have the technical skills to employ countermeasures.
That’s not something someone is likely to learn from a Reddit post response 
What do you mean reroute?
Would it be viable to work out of my home country but connect my work laptop to a travel router (installed with a VPN that shows my location as my home city) before I connect my work laptop to corporate VPN? Am I missing any details here?
Bonus question: are there other ways an employer tracks your physical location besides your IP address?
Which of these methods your employer may have of tracking your location vary depending on how paranoid they are and how good their IT department is. The consequences of being found out can also vary wildly. By working from another country you’re probably putting them in violation of some laws (how many depends on your industry and your job responsibilities), and definitely demonstrating that you’re willing to carry out an ongoing deception.
Can’t you basically disable wifi and only run internet through a ethernet cable running from a VPN travel router? Thanks for the reply!