This guide gives you several points to help protect your identity while surfing the internet in the hope to stay anonymous online.
1) Proxying
What is it?
A proxy allows you to ‘bounce’ your connection through a proxy server. A proxy server is essentially another computer running on the internet that allows you to connect to it and browse the web through its internet connection.
Advantages:
Allows you to stay semi-anonymous, depending on the levels of logging and type of proxy server running.
Disadvantages:
Potentially your web browsing habits could be logged, if you are using a rogue proxy server. Speed can also sometimes be an issue if using a proxy outside of your country.
Recommended Proxy Sites: Vtunnel.com / hidemyass.com / Anonymouse.org
2) VPN Connections
What is it?
A VPN allows you to establish an encrypted secure connection to a proxy server, ensuring data that passes through your connection to the encrypted server is cloaked, and cannot be sniffed or attacked via Man In The Middle attacks. It is essentially a more secure version of a Proxy.
Advantages:
More secure, and allows for better Anonymity than a traditional Proxy.
Disadvantages:
Normally these services are more complicated to setup, and more expensive than a Proxy which can be free.
Recommended VPN Sites: Swissvpn.net / Tor Proxy Project / BolechVPN
3) Browser version spoofing
What is it?
When you spoof your web browser version, you are changing the version or name of the browser to fool potential snoops by giving them fake information. For example in Google Chrome, to spoof the version to give off a Firefox version you could do something like this in the Chrome shortcut target properties:
“C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090305 Firefox/3.1b3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)”
The data inside of the quotes is the version Chrome will give off. In this example: “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090305 Firefox/3.1b3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)”
Advantages:
Fooling the site logging system or potential info harvesters to the true version of your web browser.
Disadvantages:
For a beginner it’s not so easy to implement if you don’t understand how to modify shortcut targets.
4) Check what information you are exposing online
You can use various sites to see what it’s possible to find out about your PC when you visit a website.
Advantages:
Useful for your own self diagnostics and to help ensure you are as hidden as possible
Recommended Sites: Steve Gibson Shields Up.
5) Use a free email account not a personal one
If you use the same email everywhere chances are it can be found and associated with you or your identity by quickly searching for it in Google. We recommend you sign up to a free account, using a proxy, such as gmail or mail.com
Advantages:
Ensure your email account you use online is separate from your personal email account and cannot be found in a Google search.