This is interesting to me. Because you have other providers who also claim no-logs with port forwarding who don’t have this problem, ignore it, just deal with it, or something else is going on.

Maybe the pedophiles and malware hosters for some reason just really bought into Mullvad’s ad copy and all hopped on board at levels no competitor has seen (I have seen them mentioned at levels I haven’t seen since pirates were raving about PIA back before they were bought out). That or it suggests something about the level of cooperation that other providers who provide no-logs (claimed) and port-forwarding give to law enforcement at least on the level of hosting of CSAM and malware stuff. That or that their competitors are willing to invest personnel into shutting down accounts in a timely manner who engage in that kind of stuff so the bad actors ignore them. One could optimistically hope they work closely with law enforcement and turn on logging temporarily for such investigations only long enough to identify the perpetrator, grab their real external idea from state tables and pass it to law enforcement.

(Context: They clearly are shutting this down for two reasons, one is clearly stated in malware/malicious activities, the other is obfuscated but can really only be CSAM hosting and people on reddit in their sub were confirming that the Iknowwhatyoudownload website is flagging IPs associated with that service for hosting CSAM)

This does make it much less useful for the main use most have for VPNs though which is p2p bittorrent file-sharing so I expect that’s going to hurt though it should drop the amount of bandwidth they pay for significantly too and maybe just leave more profitable privacy seekers.

I truly hope that it was something about them and that other providers that I use don’t get inundated with these criminals and remove port forwarding entirely.