I’ll be honest, after reading that article, it does seem a bit frustrating how they handled their leak, but it also doesn’t give a compelling argument for calling it “one of the worst”. There have been far worse providers, including providers that have not even been a true VPN. Or providers who don’t protect you from DNS leaks.
While I don’t condone security breaches, they happen (I’m a 25 year IT veteran myself, and currently in cybersecurity and systems management). I don’t use NordVPN myself but one of their competitors for many years now. I truly couldn’t care less about their ads since I never see them, I only care about the security of the connection. At this time, I only know of this one breach of essentially one server, but they are doing pretty much everything right in investigating and fixing things so it would never happen in the same way again.
From that article, even after they documented NordVPN’s findings and their own findings, they still gave them a score of 4/5. That’s a far cry from “one of the worst” as you put it.
Yes, I could search for it too, but I was asking you specifically. It sounds like you might just have a grudge against their ads, but hey I get it, ads suck. Literally the only ad I ever get for them is from in-video ads from Harry Mack, but he freestyles them soooooo I’m pretty okay with those.