Be Anonymous

[...w3]

Anonymity and Myths

The main question is of course, what are you trying to hide? Closely following that is how important is it? The precautions you take have to weigh up to the value of the data you are trying to protect, in this case, you are trying to protect your anonymity. In the recent years privacy and anonymity have become big issues with CCTV cameras everywhere, and projects like Echelon reading all your e-mails and reporting back to the Orwellian ‘Big Brother’. So just for normal surfing, or if you are planning on hacking a foreign governments personnel database (not that I recommend that of course), you need to protect yourself in different ways.

Remember Anonymity is not an absolute, there are varying degrees.

The Myths

Using a proxy I found on the web in my browser is enough.

People have been using proxies for years, normally open proxies found from scanning large IP ranges on the internet, what you have to think though, is this proxy open for a purpose? Is this purpose to listen to what you are doing? To collect your passwords? Also it’s not infallible, remember the traffic has to go from your computer to the proxy, and come back in, those records can be corelated in your country alone and need to external aid. Plus the proxy may keep records of who access what and when, it make be a honeypot and keep full packet logs of all completed TCP/IP sessions. The problem is you just don’t know.

If I chain proxies no one can find me.

Also not true, it doesn’t matter if you cross through Taiwan, Korea, Russia and Iraq, your ISP just needs to see the packets going out and coming in at the right times to your machine from the last proxy hop in your chain.

The Reality

It can be said, pretty much whole heartedly, there is no such thing as real anonymity online, if you do something bad enough, the people in power can find you. IP Spoofing is misunderstood in 9/10 cases and is no protection against anything (I’ll write an article about this later). And web proxies, as above, offer little or no protection. They are good enough if you just want to stop your school/parents/office from tracking your surfing habits, but they won’t protect you from doing time if you commit a federal crime. The next best thing from this is Onion Routing, the common peer to peer implementation known as Tor.

Onion Routing prevents the transport medium from knowing who is communicating with whom — the network knows only that communication is taking place. In addition, the content of the communication is hidden from eavesdroppers up to the point where the traffic leaves the OR network.

Source: Onion Router

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

You can read more at the Tor site, the Wikipedia articles Onion routing and Tor (anonymity network).

Getting Tored Up

For most people Tor is enough, I recommend getting the Tor Bundle, which includes Tor, TorCP and Privoxy. All you need to do is set your applications to use a proxy, host is localhost and port is 8118. Instructions with screenshots are here: Linux/BSD/Unix, Windows. Then you’re done, it works for most applications. Just remember though it’s encrypted from your machine to the end point, not from the end point to wherever it’s going, so that Tor node can see whatever traffic you are sending through Tor.. So make sure you encrypt (POPS, SMTP with TLS etc).


Freenet p2p software

Freenet project is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous.

Freenet can be thought of as a large storage device. When you store a file in it, you receive a key which can be used to retrieve the file. When you supply Freenet with a key, it returns the appropriate file (if it is located). The storage space is distributed among all connected nodes on Freenet.

Freenet is a Peer-to-peer network, which is both decentralized and anonymized. The nodes that you connect to only knows its nearest neighbours and has no idea about how the network as a whole is structured.

Freenet is built on the principle of small world networks. By connecting to nodes of people you already know, and the people you know in turn connect to people they know, one should be able to reach all nodes in a Freenet network.

XeroBank (aka Torpark) Browser and XeroBank anonymity network

xB Browser is an commercial anonymous web browser designed to run on both the Tor and XeroBank anonymity network. xB Browser was originally forked from Portable Firefox web browser with Tor access built into it, but was redesigned from scratch in 2007. It is designed for use on portable media such as a USB flash drive but it can also be used on any hard disk drive. The XeroBank network routes traffic through at least two multi-jurisdictional hops. In contrast to Tor, the XeroBank network is immune to 3rd-party traffic injection, supports both TCP and UDP protocols, and performs channel multiplexing for low observability, however it is run by a single entity.

True Anonymity?

When you do this, you should make sure you are using an anonymous operating system, so what better than a bootable distro especially for this purpose, called Anonym-OS, You can check it out here.

kaos.theory’s Anonym.OS LiveCD is a bootable live cd based on OpenBSD that provides a hardened operating environment whereby all ingress traffic is denied and all egress traffic is automatically and transparently encrypted and/or anonymized.
unfortunately it's no longer updated.

Incognito is a linux distro includes:
* Tor for anonymous internet browsing.
* TrueCrypt, a file/partition encryption utility.
* Enigmail, a security extension for Thunderbird.
* Torbutton, a Firefox plugin to improve Tor's anonymity in Firefox.
* FireGPG, Firefox plugin for using GnuPG for Webmail.
* GnuPG, OpenPGP implementation for encryption.
* KeePassX, a password manager.

Besides these tools, during system shutdown, the RAM is overwritten to ensure no possibility of data recovery
later.

source: http://tools.rosinstrument.com/proxy/howto.htm (i edited it)

[flAmingw0rm]

Good job dude, i've read all tut and it's awesome. 5/5

[Vorfin]

Good guide, you are w3knight right?

[...w3]

ya im w3knight
once i reach 10 posts i'll put in my sig

[Codine]

This was a very nice guide, i've bookmarked it for future referance. Thank you.

['Snorlax]

A good tool for anonymously surfing is Hotspot Shield.
Best tool ever, but connection is low compared to your regular.

[HuNt3R]

lol nice guide Bro

[UID=0]

Interesting, as I did install Tor, together with OperaTor, a while ago, for Firefox, but then I began to see negative reports about it,
regarding various things, such as privacy 'leaks' and so on, so I only tried it the once, so didn't really get much of a feel for it, so I can't really say what I thought about it.

Also, when a VPN, claims something like:

'At ItsHidden.com we create a connection called a VPN. This is a secure connection that encrypts all your information and is not readable
by anyone else, so wherever you are your privacy is always maintained! There is no software required and ItsHidden.com works on all Platforms including Windows, Mac, Linux, IPhone etc

Source:

www.itshidden.com

This is using: - 128 Bit Secure Connection to ensure privacy over all networks.

Are you saying that this is not true?

For example, I could connect to the VPN and from there, go to a web-based anonymizing proxy service, such as

http://www.crazycam.org/web-proxy/

and once there, I could then enter another web-based proxy into the address bar, of the crazycam site, such as:

http://www.bypassblocked.info/

which looks like:

http://www.crazycam.org/web-proxy/index....slM0QmYj01

in the browser address bar, which shows the crazycam proxy, but the VPN and the second anonymixer isn't readable to me anyhow.

From the last anonymizer, I could then go to the end-site, that I wanted to access.

VPN -> Anonymizer1 -> Anonymizer2 -> End site.

So, I'm just wondering how my ISP, or anybody else, can see what I am doing, when at least at ItsHidden,
they seem to make it clear, that 'all the information, is not readable by anyone else?'

On a blog site about Tor, they include this:

Encryption doesn't mask how much you say, when you say it, etc.

Source:

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchiv...and_t.html

But it doesn't exactly say that it is not encrypted, it just says it doesn't mask how much is said.

I would be pleased to find out, the actual truth here, because there seem to be conflicting opinions about this matter.

[Marda]

nery nice guide love it

[heretician]

Interesting, as I did install Tor, together with OperaTor, a while ago, for Firefox, but then I began to see negative reports about it,
regarding various things, such as privacy 'leaks' and so on, so I only tried it the once, so didn't really get much of a feel for it, so I can't really say what I thought about it.

Also, when a VPN, claims something like:

'At ItsHidden.com we create a connection called a VPN. This is a secure connection that encrypts all your information and is not readable
by anyone else, so wherever you are your privacy is always maintained! There is no software required and ItsHidden.com works on all Platforms including Windows, Mac, Linux, IPhone etc

Source:

www.itshidden.com

This is using: - 128 Bit Secure Connection to ensure privacy over all networks.

Are you saying that this is not true?

For example, I could connect to the VPN and from there, go to a web-based anonymizing proxy service, such as

http://www.crazycam.org/web-proxy/

and once there, I could then enter another web-based proxy into the address bar, of the crazycam site, such as:

http://www.bypassblocked.info/

which looks like:

http://www.crazycam.org/web-proxy/index....slM0QmYj01

in the browser address bar, which shows the crazycam proxy, but the VPN and the second anonymixer isn't readable to me anyhow.

From the last anonymizer, I could then go to the end-site, that I wanted to access.

VPN -> Anonymizer1 -> Anonymizer2 -> End site.

So, I'm just wondering how my ISP, or anybody else, can see what I am doing, when at least at ItsHidden,
they seem to make it clear, that 'all the information, is not readable by anyone else?'

On a blog site about Tor, they include this:

Encryption doesn't mask how much you say, when you say it, etc.

Source:

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchiv...and_t.html

But it doesn't exactly say that it is not encrypted, it just says it doesn't mask how much is said.

I would be pleased to find out, the actual truth here, because there seem to be conflicting opinions about this matter.

I like this just as much as the Original Post. That wouldn't happen to be the same VPN that is advertised on TPB would it?

=) +1