First of all, I'm really new to all of this and I might be talking out of my butt when I get into anything technical, so please don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong - always willing to learn .

Recently I decided to start using a VPN because I use the dorm internet and I want privacy. I was using it happily until I realized that I've never actually tried checking whether it's working correctly or not.

I did some googling and found this website:

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/check-vpn-connection-actually-encrypted/

which told how to check whether your traffic is actually being encrypted. The website told me to download this program called Wireshark and use it to look at the contents of the packets going through my connection. For most of the packets the contents were just gibberish as expected, but whenever I stumbled upon a traffic with "DNS" labeled as the protocol, I could see some text in the clear that contained some urls of some websites, some of which being the websites I visited while wireshark was on.

My question is - is there any cause for concern? If not, why? And if yes, is there a way to fix this?