Skip to content

How to remove default route to vpn

Quite often especially on corporate networks, once connected to company VPN, all your traffic starts going via your company VPN, meaning – they watching what you do.
Most people may not even suspect that but it is quite simple to find out.
So I am gonna show how to do that on Mac with few commands everyone can run.

OK, lets check out routing tables when connected to VPN:

netstat -nr | grep '0/1\'
0/1                10.225.222.129     UGSc           70        0   utun3
default            192.168.0.1        UGSc           12       11     en0
128.0/1            10.225.222.129     UGSc            0        0   utun3

As you can see VPN created these two destinations 0/1 and 128.0/1 to go via utun3 (it could be utun0..N, meaning vpn tunnel), 10.225.222.129 is your VPN server.

Btw if you wondering what those short notation mean try ipcalc:

~ ipcalc 128.0.0.0/1 | grep 'HostMin\|HostMax'
HostMin:   128.0.0.1            1 0000000.00000000.00000000.00000001
HostMax:   255.255.255.254      1 1111111.11111111.11111111.11111110
~ ipcalc 0.0.0.0/1 | grep 'HostMin\|HostMax'
HostMin:   0.0.0.1              0 0000000.00000000.00000000.00000001
HostMax:   127.255.255.254      0 1111111.11111111.11111111.11111110

It is basically covering everything from 0.0.0.1 till 255.255.255.254, basically all IP addresses.

Indeed if I trace my traffic it goes right to VPN server:

traceroute google.com
traceroute: Warning: google.com has multiple addresses; using 74.125.193.113
traceroute to google.com (74.125.193.113), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  ip-10-225-222-129 (10.225.222.129)  24.244 ms  26.419 ms  34.542 ms
^

Now, lets delete those routes, you will obviously need root access:

sudo route delete -net 0/1 -ifp  utun3
sudo route delete -net 128.0/1 -ifp  utun3

Now if we trace again:

traceroute google.com
traceroute: Warning: google.com has multiple addresses; using 74.125.193.113
traceroute to google.com (74.125.193.113), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  ip-192-168-0-1 (192.168.0.1)  3.709 ms  3.085 ms  3.429 ms

as you can see it changed to 192.168.0.1, which is your home router.