ExpressVPN has been all over the news for the past week, and not in a good way. Because we recommend ExpressVPN here at ZDNet as one of the top VPNs out there, I've gotten a flood of reader questions asking for an objective read on the news. In this article, I'll do my best.

Sitrep

Let's start with a sitrep (situation report). There are two key items which are tangentially related.

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The first item is thatKape Technologieshas announced plans to acquire ExpressVPN for$986 million. I do have concerns about this because Kape was once considered a malware provider. I'll talk more about this in a bit.

The second item is a report in Reuters indicating that ExpressVPN CIO Daniel Gericke is among three men fined$1.6 million by the US Department of Justice for hacking and spying on US citizens on behalf of the government of the UAE (United Arab Emirates).

I'll discuss each of these reports individually, and then share with you some thoughts about how these situations might impact your decision to use (or not use) ExpressVPN.

Kape Technologies

Kape Technologies has had quite a convoluted history. According to a report inForbes, a company called Crossrider was formed in 2011 by "billionaire Teddy Sagi, a serial entrepreneur and ex-con who was jailed for insider trading in the 1990s. His biggest money maker to date is gambling software developer Playtech," and Koby Menachemi.

Menachemi was a developer for Unit 8200, an Israeli signals intelligence unit responsible for hacking and collecting data (think of it as part CIA, part NSA, and part high school, because the unit hires and trains teenagers in hacking and coding skills).

Crossrider's business was ad injection. Remember back in the day when companies like Yahoo tried to convince you to download their browser extension with their search bar? Crossrider's business was creating tools that allowed them to inject ads into other companies' web pages, sometimes overriding even ads that were paid to run on the sites that were being compromised.

Ad injection skirted the line between just being scummy and being malware.Forbesreported that Symantec's anti-malware identified software based on Crossrider's product as malware, in part because the product effectively stole the ad revenue from the sites its users visited, and in part because it collected whatever data it could find in the process.

According to Publift, an ad partnering service founded by ex-Googlers, the ad injection business is still out there. But Google has been fighting it for about five years now, meaning it's not nearly as lucrative a business as it once was.

According to a 2018 report in the Israeli business dailyGlobes, Kape Technologies was a rebranding effort on the part of then relatively new Crossrider CEO Ido Erlichman. Crossrider's share price had fallen to a low of