Nowadays everything we do on the internet is being tracked by big companies like Google, Facebook etc and Government Agencies like NSA etc. This information is later used for selling ads or for other purposes that you may not want them to do with your data.
There are many ways to protect yourself from online tracking but we will only talk about two of those, One TOR and the other proxy servers.
TOR
TOR or The Onion Router was developed by US Office of Naval Research in the 1990s. It was developed to find a way to navigate the internet without being tracked.
TOR uses network of routers separate from the internet to encrypt the IP addresses in a way to not let anyone watching determine where the traffic is coming from or where it is going.
How It Works?
TOR uses some 7000 routers that are spread around the world and are separate from the internet to send packets and receive data. These routers are shared by volunteers to allow to be used by TOR services.
TOR also encrypts the data, sender and destination IP address and all the packets to make them untraceable. The data is encrypted by the sender's client and is decrypted by the receiver client. If the packet is intercepted it will only contain the IP address of the previous router and the website visited will only see the IP address of the last router as well. All this to ensure anonymity on the web.
Using TOR
To use TOR services you have to download and install the TOR browser from the Official TOR project website and after installing you will be able to access the internet the normal way as you do on other browsers but here no one will be able to track you.
Being anonymous on the Web have it tradeoffs too. One of them is slow speed, TOR jumps from many routers and encrypts all packets to reach its destination and come back with data and this causes it to work a little slower than other browsers.
In addition to anonymity, TOR also enables us to navigate the Dark Web that normal browers and search engines like Google can not have access to.
But you have use it carefully because what ever you do on the internet can be traced back to you even if you use TOR. TOR jsut makes it more difficult to do that. Use at your own risk.
Proxy Servers
Another way to achieve anonymity on the web is to use Porxy Servers. Proxy server takes our request that we send to a website and sends this request using his own IP address and after receving the data from the destination website sends us back the data.
This allows us to stay invisible to the destination server as the destination server only reveives traffic from the proxy server and not directly from us.
Using Proxy Server With Proxychains
In Linux there is a tool called proxychains that allows us to use one or more proxy servers. Using it is very simple, you just provide the command you want to run anonymously as the argument to the proxychains command.
Linux> proxychains <command to be proxied>
# Example
# Linux> proxychains nmap -sT <IP address>
This example will use namp to scan the target IP address but the target will only see the address of the proxy server we setup.
Setting Up Proxy Server
proxychains looks for /etc/proxychains.conf file for the configuration of the proxy and also for the server's IP address and what protocol and port it uses. To setup the proxy server in the conf file edit the /etc/proxychains.conf file using an editor like vim or nano and do the following.
Linux> sudo vi /etc/proxychains.conf
# proxychains.conf
# # Here are all the comments in the file
# # that when you open will explain how
# # to edit and what settings are available
# # to use.
# --- ---- ----
#dynamic_chain <- UnComment this
# ---- ---- ----
# at the end of the files add the proxyserver
# with the protocol and port separated by
# space as shown below
# <protocol> <ip.add.re.ss> <port>
socks5 192.168.10.1 8080
You can find the list of free proxyservers setup by other internet users by searching for free proxyserver list and use one of them but be careful when selecting one.
After setting up my proxychains.conf file I will run the following command which will open the Firefox browser with Google telling me the IP address of the proxy server that I setup right now.
Linux> proxychains firefox google.com/search?q=my ip adderss
There are many ways to be secure on the internet but these are the ones that I have used the most up to now.
zainsci