Today Cyber Morans, we go DARK!
Anonymous surfing, streaming and downloading can be difficult. Websites, companies and services can closely follow our online behavior. Do you want more online privacy and prevent people from studying your online activities? There are a few ways to protect your online privacy.
Many of your online actions are not as private as you might think. These days, countless parties attempt to follow our online behavior as closely as they can. Our internet service providers, the administrators of our networks, our browser, search engines, the apps we’ve installed, social media platforms, governments, hackers and even the websites we visit all know – to a certain extent – what we’re doing online.
If you don’t want your mate to find out you visited Pornhub with their laptop, using the incognito mode will suffice. However, if you don’t want anyone to know what you do online, a simple incognito mode won’t do.
Do you want to surf, stream or download anonymously? There are a few ways to protect your online privacy. Here are some efficient methods to stay anonymous online:
Use a VPN connection.
Using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a suitable way to browse the internet anonymously. When you’re connected to a VPN server, your connection is secure. The software ensures that all your online traffic is encrypted using special protocols, so your data can no longer be read by others.
Moreover, your IP address stays hidden, because you automatically take on the IP address of the VPN server you’re using. An IP address is the identification number of your internet connection and can reveal your location and ultimately your identity. A VPN hides your real IP address for others; they only see the IP address of the VPN server. This way, the websites you visit won’t be able to see your own IP address and won’t be able to identify you.
Do you want to surf anonymously at school or at work? A VPN will help here, too. With a VPN you’ll be able to stay anonymous whether you’re at school, at work or just on your home network. It’s also quite effective against doxing.
Choose a privacy-friendly browser.
It’s wise to go back to basics and make sure to choose a browser that helps you protect your anonymity. But which browser is the best to use in this case? Different popular browsers have very different ways of dealing with user privacy. Just remember;
1. Stay away from Microsoft Edge
2. Google Chrome: awesome browser, lacks some privacy features
3. Apple’s Safari does its job well
4. Mozilla Firefox: the best and most well-known browser for privacy
5. Full blown anonymous browsing: the Tor browser
Use a proxy server.
The use of a proxy server also provides some anonymity online. When using a proxy, you send a request for information to that proxy server, which then sends it on to the right website. The website will only be able to see the IP address of the proxy server and not your own. A proxy doesn’t have the same level of encryption as a VPN does. Even though the websites you visit won’t be able to see directly who you are, your IP address and online traffic are still much easier to unravel than would be the case when using a VPN. Other parties will still be able to see what you do. The only thing keeping them from knowing your identity is the proxy’s IP. This is because proxies don’t protect or encrypt your connection.
Search the web with an anonymous search engine.
There’s also the option of using an anonymous search engine. DuckDuckGo is probably the best known anonymous search engine. Anonymous search engines such as DuckDuckGo are alternatives for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines that like to collect and use your data. When you use DuckDuckGo, your search terms and the links you clicked aren’t traced. Moreover, the websites you visit won’t be able to see which search terms you used. However, they’ll still know that you’ve visited their page. This registration happens through your IP address. Through DuckDuckGo you can search the internet with more anonymity than a regular search engine, but it can’t offer you full anonymity or privacy.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t have the same budget and manpower as big businesses like Google. This means that the presented search result won’t be as optimized. However, some say that this is actually a good thing for those who focus on privacy. After all, DuckDuckGo shows everyone who enters the same keywords the same search results. Google, on the contrary, adjusts your results to your user profile. The inaccuracy of DuckDuckGo, hence, shows that they’re actually sticking to their promise of anonymity. Our advice is to try out DuckDuckGo to see whether you like it.
A second anonymous search engine is Startpage. This is a privacy-friendly search system that draws its search results from Google, but doesn’t use tracking. We also recommend you try out this one.
Manage your privacy settings.
Facebook is known to share its users’ personal information with advertisers. This is why women tend to get menstrual care ads on their Facebook feed while men don’t. However, Facebook takes this practice a lot further: they also track what you do when you aren’t on their site. If you’ve been looking for car insurance online, it’s very likely you’ll see a relevant ad on your Facebook feed. Facebook allows you to change this slightly in the privacy settings of your account. After you have changed these settings, they might not show selected ads anymore, but you will still see ads. Moreover, they will keep gathering information on you. Through their own services, it isn’t possible to turn off their tracking. You can only slightly tweak what comes up in your newsfeed.
Google also allows you to turn off add personalization. Again, this does not mean all ads will disappear, nor will Google stop tracking your data traffic. As a rule, you can say that these big companies built on advertisement revenues won’t stop tracking us, unless we make it impossible with, for instance, a VPN.
So to recap; Use Mozilla Firefox or the Tor browser, Use an anonymous search engine, like DuckDuckGo, Adjust your privacy settings on social media sites and use a VPN.
But wht if you wish to go deeper, what if you wish to totally go anonymous to a point its almost impossible to track online. This doesn't have to be for nefarious purposes, journalists, law enforcement, OSINT all require anonymity online as basic op-sec. Say to investigate extra judicial killings in a country, or investigating corruption. Also for people in countries that censor the internet can navigate this with TOR. This will allow them to cover their tracks. Unfortunately, they dont. Thats why they are picked off and silenced by any means, investigations compromised and their movements and activities tracked around the Internet.
TOR PROJECT
When you use the Tor network, your traffic is layered in encryption and routed via a random relay, where it's wrapped in another layer of encryption. That's done three times across a decentralised network of nodes called a circuit — the nodes are run by privacy-focused volunteers; thanks, you lovely people — making it difficult to track you or for sites to see where you're actually located.
Alongside bouncing encrypted traffic through random nodes, the Tor browser deletes your browsing history and cleans up cookies after each session. But it has other clever tricks to push back against trackers. If someone visits two different sites that use the same tracking system, they'd normally be followed across both. The Tor browser spots such surveillance and opens each via a different circuit making the connections look like two different people, so the websites can't link the activity or identity if they login on one of the sites.
It's almost embarrassingly easy thanks to the Tor Browser. Based on Mozilla's Firefox, this browser hides all that pinging about in the background. "It's a web browser. Use it like one. It's that simple," says Muffett. That's the desktop edition, but there's a version for Android and an unsupported onion browsing app for iOS.
INTO THE WEEDS: TOR
While some can simply install and use the Tor browser like any other, there are a few complications for those in countries where Tor is blocked, on corporate or university networks where it's banned, or where more security is needed. When you start a session, you'll be shown an option to Connect or Configure. The latter choice is for when access to the Tor network is blocked, and you'll be shown a variety of circumvention techniques. Those include traffic obfuscation tools called pluggable transports, which make it look like Tor traffic is random or going to major websites such as Amazon, rather than connecting to the onion network. If you're having trouble connecting to the Tor network, try one of these.
There are different levels of security in the browser that are worth considering. To review security settings, click on the onion logo in the top left and select "Security Settings", which will bring up a slider offering a choice of the default of standard, or safer and safest. In "safer" mode, JavaScript is disabled on HTTP sites, some fonts are disabled, and all audio and video won't run automatically, you'll have to click to play. Slide up to the "safest" level, and as well as those settings, JavaScript is disabled on all sites.
Once you've downloaded and installed the Tor browser, you can browse just as you would your usual browser, but avoid unencrypted sites — those with only "http" in the URL rather than "HTTPS". This is because plain old HTTP traffic can be tampered with." Luckily, the Tor Browser comes with the HTTPS Everywhere add-on installed by default, which forces a site to serve the secure version if one is available.
TOR isnt perfect
There's no such thing as perfectly private or secure on the internet. It's still possible to track someone's traffic pinging through the Tor nodes, though it is difficult. And, of course, people, websites and third-party trackers will know who you are if you choose to identify yourself online. People can accidentally give that away just by posting their real name, email address, or other identifying details, in a blog comment.
If you do log into a site or otherwise identify yourself, the Tor Browser has techniques to limit the spread of who knows. One is "new identity"; select this in the main menu and all open tabs and windows will shut down, clearing cookies, history and Tor circuits. That means that if you've logged into a site or otherwise identified yourself, you can avoid that site from following you elsewhere. Another similar tool is the "new Tor circuit" option, which resets the circuit so you look like a new connection, making you harder to track.
Conclusion
In this one I introduced techniques to stay anonymous online. Then Introduced Tor and how it works. In the next one, we will, Install and use TOR to go into the dark web and the deep web. Dont miss Part 2 of this blog, we get our hands dirty. I'll see you next time Tiger.
