Ipad potentially with virus

Would there be any response possible that would convince you to not do this again? Between what you tell us you did here, and that VPN you decided to load, your privacy is already seemingly not a priority.

Without knowing exactly what transpired here including side-loading or profile loading or whatever else that might possibly have happened here, I’d Factory Reset, run Safety Check, and remove the VPN app. Particularly if I were concerned a decide used for testing untrusted apps and services—preferably configured on a testing Apple ID—was potentially compromised.

Personal Safety User Guide - Apple Support

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings - Apple Support

If there’s already been a security compromise, whatever damage and whatever data uploads have already happened.

If you have an old battery in this iPad (80% or lower), that’s a separate issue, and typically unrelated to security.

You can't infect an iPad simply by watching a video in a web browser.

What you're seeing is nothing more than the effects of an old battery. The 6th gen iPad I'm on right now is the same. The battery takes longer than when new to charge back up to 100%, and loses power much faster than when new.

The iPad itself should be fine. Watching a movie streams the video from the source. A file is never downloaded to your device.

But, what I think MrHoffman is getting at is the use of a VPN at all. Even a paid version such as Nord VPN does you no actual good. In reality, they're useless for protecting your privacy on the web. Also in reality, the folks running the VPN can collect all kinds of information about you. The same information you think they're trying to to protect you from.

Public VPN's are anything but private.

A VPN can do absolutely nothing to hide any data going between you and the site you're viewing since only half of the communication is encrypted. Anything going to the site from the VPN and back to it is in the clear, or the site you're accessing would have no idea what to do with the encrypted data.

A VPN has only two uses:

1. You're using it to send and receive content from a truly tunneled VPN at your place of employment. Only the servers at the office get the unencrypted data from you as output from the VPN. Anything coming back to you is encrypted. Meaning, anyone trying to capture data between you and the office will only ever see encrypted data. A hacker would have to somehow breach the business' server on the clear input/output side, or your end to get anything.

2. You're trying to hide yourself. Since a VPN encrypts what's coming back to you, it does a good job at hiding what IP address the data is going back to (and as the link mentions, even this doesn't do a good job of hiding you anymore). However, any and all VPN's log this data. If you do anything illegal and law enforcement tracks the clear data back to the VPN (and they can), they'll demand log data to see what IP address the data was output to. The site running the VPN will give you up. They aren't going to go to jail for what you do.

Free VPNs sell your data.  (just one of many sites explaining this)

https://thebestvpn.com/how-free-vpns-sell-your-data/

This isn't exactly breaking news. It's been known for a very long time that free VPN's (in particular) log and sell your data. How else do you think they pay for their servers?

It's the same model as Google, and in particular, Chrome. You are the product. Chrome runs a background daemon from the moment you turn your computer on, whether Chrome itself is running or not. Its job is to constantly send anonymized data back to Google about your web and personal computer usage.

NordVPN is supposedly one of the better offerings. But it's still mostly useless. No matter what web site you're communicating with, only what you send to the VPN and it sends back to you is encrypted. Every bit of data out of the VPN to the site you're visiting, and from there back to the VPN is the same as using no VPN at all. It has to be, or the sites you're visiting would just get a load of encrypted data they can't do anything with.

VPN reviews you find online are also almost completely untrustworthy:

Former Malware Distributor Kape Technologies Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN “Review” Websites

nye209 wrote:

The vpn I was using was Nord VPN

In general, an add-on first-few-hops VPN is an overhyped and unnecessary overhead, but overhead that’s perfectly positioned and configured to collect metadata. The first-few-hops VPN badly solves a problem that hasn’t existed for a decade or so.

Outside of geoshifting for website testing or such, a first-few-hops VPN is a weak wrapper around the existing and stronger end-to-end tunnels already in use.

A potential alternative: the existing end-to-end tunnels, and Private Relay.

The first-few-hops VPN may well be a factor here though, depending on the load on the servers—the servers that are perfectly positioned to collect your personally-identified metadata.

But in terms of malware or other shenanigans, the first-few-hops VPN is not relevant.