Hey guys, today I'm back with another interesting and useful topic staying anonymous on the internet. It's going to be fun and interactive, so let's begin.
Today, nearly everything we do on the internet is tracked. Whoever is doing the tracking whether it be Google tracking our online searches, website visits, and email or the National Security Agency (NSA) cataloging all our activities our every online move is being recorded, indexed, and then mined for someone’s benefit. The average individual and the hacker, in
Note: No one of these is a sure way to hide yourself on the internet, given enough time and resources, you could be tracked. But this makes the tracker's job pretty hard.
In the 1990s, the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) set out to develop a method for anonymously navigating the internet for espionage purposes. The plan was to set up a network of routers that was separate from the internet’s routers, that could encrypt the traffic, and that only stored the unencrypted IP address of the previous router—meaning all other router addresses along the way were encrypted. The idea was that anyone watching the traffic could not determine the origin or destination of the data. This research became known as “The Onion Router (Tor) Project” in 2002, and it’s now available to anyone to use for relatively safe and anonymous navigation on the web.
particular needs to understand how to limit this tracking and remain relatively anonymous on the web to limit this ubiquitous surveillance.
Whatever your reason is, there are many different ways that you can do it and I'm going to show you 3 easy ways to hide yourself, whether as a hacker or as an average person. The 3 ways are:
- The Onion Network
- Virtual Private networks (VPNs for short)
- Private encrypted emailing
Note: No one of these is a sure way to hide yourself on the internet, given enough time and resources, you could be tracked. But this makes the tracker's job pretty hard.
The Onion Router System
In the 1990s, the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) set out to develop a method for anonymously navigating the internet for espionage purposes. The plan was to set up a network of routers that was separate from the internet’s routers, that could encrypt the traffic, and that only stored the unencrypted IP address of the previous router—meaning all other router addresses along the way were encrypted. The idea was that anyone watching the traffic could not determine the origin or destination of the data. This research became known as “The Onion Router (Tor) Project” in 2002, and it’s now available to anyone to use for relatively safe and anonymous navigation on the web.
How Tor Works
Information sent over Tor are not sent over the regular routers so closely monitored by so many but rather are sent over a network of over 8,000 routers around the world, thanks to volunteers who allow their computers to be used by Tor.
On top of using a totally separate router network, Tor encrypts the data, destination, and sender IP address of each packet of information. At each hop, the information is encrypted and then decrypted by the next hop when it’s received. In this way, each packet contains information about only the previous hop along the path and not the IP address of the origin. If someone intercepts the traffic, they can see only the IP address of the previous hop, and the website owner can see only the IP address of the last router that sent the traffic. This ensures relative anonymity across the internet.
Free commercial email services such as Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook Webmail (formerly Hotmail) are free for a reason: they are vehicles for tracking your interests and serving up advertisements.
To enable the use of Tor, just install the Tor browser from here. Once installed, you can use it like any old internet browser.
By using this browser, you’ll be navigating the internet through a separate set of routers and will be able to visit sites without being tracked by Big Brother. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is that surfing via the Tor browser can be a lot slower; because there are not nearly as many routers, the bandwidth is limited in this network.
In addition to being capable of accessing nearly any website on the traditional internet, the Tor browser is capable of accessing the dark web.
The websites that make up the dark web require anonymity, so they allow access only through the Tor browser, and they have addresses ending in .onion for their top-level domain (TLD). The dark web is infamous for illegal activity, but a number of legitimate services are also available there. A word of caution, however: when accessing the dark web, you may come across material that many will find offensive.
Security Concerns
The intelligence and spy services of the United States and other nations consider the Tor network a threat to national security, believing such an anonymous network enables foreign governments and terrorists to communicate without being watched. As a result, a number of robust, ambitious research projects are working to break the anonymity of Tor.
Tor’s anonymity has been broken before by these authorities and will likely be broken again.
The NSA, as one instance, runs its own Tor routers, meaning that your traffic may be traversing the NSA’s routers when you use Tor. If your traffic is exiting the NSA’s routers, that’s even worse, because the exit router always knows your destination.
The NSA also has a method known as traffic correlation, which involves looking for patterns in incoming and outgoing traffic, that has been able to break Tor’s anonymity. Though these attempts to break Tor won’t affect Tor’s effectiveness at obscuring your identity from commercial services, such as Google, they may limit the browser’s effectiveness in keeping you anonymous from spy agencies.
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
Using a virtual private network (VPN) can be an effective way to keep your web traffic relatively anonymous and secure. A VPN is used to connect to an intermediary internet device such as a router that sends your traffic to its ultimate destination tagged with the IP address of the router. Using a VPN can certainly enhance your security and privacy, but it’s not a guarantee of anonymity. The internet device you connect to must record or log your IP address to be able to properly send the data back to you, so anyone able to access these records can uncover information about you. The beauty of VPNs is that they are simple and easy to work with. You can open an account with a VPN provider and then seamlessly connect to the VPN each time you log on to your computer. You would use your browser as usual to navigate the web, but it will appear to anyone watching that your traffic is coming from the IP address and location of the internet VPN device and not your own. In addition, all traffic between you and the VPN device is encrypted, so even your internet service provider can’t see
your traffic. Among other things, a VPN can be effective in evading government controlled
content and information censors. For instance, if your national government limits your access to websites with a particular political message, you can likely use a VPN based outside your country in order to access that content. Some media corporations, such as Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, limit
access to their content to IP addresses originating from their own nation. Using a VPN based in a nation that those services allow can often get you around those access limitations. Some of the best and most popular commercial VPN services, are the following:
- IPVanish
- NordVPN(recommended)
- Cyberghost
- Surf shark VPN
- Private Internet Access
- Hide My Ass (HMA)
- Express VPN
- TorGuard
Most of these VPN services charge $50–$100 per year, and many offer a free 30-day trial. To find out more about how to set up a VPN, choose one from the list and visit the website. You should find download, installation, and usage instructions that are pretty easy to follow.
The strength of a VPN is that all your traffic is encrypted when it leaves your computer, thus protecting you against snooping, and your IP address is cloaked by the VPN IP address when you visit a site. As with a proxy server, the owner of the VPN has your originating IP address (otherwise they couldn’t send your traffic back to you). If they are pressured by espionage agencies or law enforcement, they might give up your identity.
One way to prevent that is to use only VPNs that promise not to store or log any of this information (and hope they are being truthful). In this way, if someone insists that the VPN service provider turn over its data on its users, there is no data
Encrypted Email
Free commercial email services such as Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook Webmail (formerly Hotmail) are free for a reason: they are vehicles for tracking your interests and serving up advertisements.
As mentioned already, if a service is free, you are the product, not the customer. In addition, the servers of the email provider (Google, for example) have access to the unencrypted contents of your email, even if you’re using HTTPS.
One way to prevent eavesdropping on your email is to use encrypted email. ProtonMail, encrypts your email from end to end or browser to browser. This means that your email is encrypted on ProtonMail servers—even the ProtonMail administrators can’t read your email. ProtonMail was founded by a group of young scientists at the CERN supercollider facility in Switzerland. The Swiss have a long and storied history of protecting secrets (remember those Swiss bank accounts you’ve heard so much about?), and ProtonMail’s servers are based in the European Union, which has much stricter laws regarding the sharing of personal data than does the United States. ProtonMail does not charge for a basic account but offers premium accounts for a nominal fee. It is important to note that when exchanging email with non-ProtonMail users, there is the potential for some or all of the email not to be encrypted. See the ProtonMail support knowledge base for full details.
Conclusion
Today, we learnt that we are constantly being surveilled by commercial firms and national intelligence agencies and to keep your data and web travels secure, you need to implement at least one of the security measures discussed in this post.
By employing them in combination, you can minimize your footprint on the web and keep your data much more secure.
The fourth method is an entire post on it's own and will be coming later. So, until next time guys, stay cool.
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