I do use a VPN sometimes but for privacy reasons, not so much for protecting myself from hackers. The primary advantage of a VPN is that your ISP can't track what you're doing online. The most common use for a VPN is watching TV and films online 'for free' for example - without the VPN you might get a letter from your ISP talking about copyright infringement and threatening to cut you off if you keeping engaging in 'piracy'. Without the VPN most communication is still encrypted though. Your ISP has a record somewhere that indicates you visited this website for example, but neither they nor any hackers can realistically intercept and read the messages between your phone/PC and this website. They can't tell what you'd doing on this website by reading your communications online - VPN or not - because communication with almost all websites these days is encrypted. For this reason a VPN doesn't actually do very much to protect you from hackers. It can hide your IP address from them if you visit a site or use a service run by a hacker. On Twitter for example, if a hacker wants to identify someone, they might create something like a fake news website, post a link to an article on this fake website, and hope that a person will click on that link and thus by visiting that website reveal their IP address. Realistically though a hacker is much more likely to try to go after your password by trying to get you to login to a fake website (a fake banking website for example) or trick you into sharing an authentication code such as the kind that you might get via text message from some sites and services, or try to get you to share personal information such as name, address, DOB and credit card number - that kind of thing. An IP address, by itself, isn't as useful to the average hacker as many people believe. Attacking an IP address alone requires hacking a device - a router, a server, a PC or phone. That's not easy, and gathering the IP address from an individual is difficult thing to do in the first place (e.g. the example of the fake news website). Your email address or phone number is a more 'risky' thing to have out there than your IP address. Not clicking on any links in a text message or email, being careful not to share too much personal information on social media and so on, will do much more to protect you from hackers than a VPN. It's a privacy tool much more than something that defends against hacking.
