Extreme Internet Surfing - How do you prevent people from snooping your computer’s intimate details when you surfing the Internet?
I can imagine that at times you do not want people to know that you are browsing their web page. For example, you may be googling some sensitive data and you do not want this result of the search to be tied to your IP address. Or perhaps, you are browsing some hacker’s page to research your article you want to blog.
There are many other reasons behind why you want to cloak your information from being given away to others, this how-to may not be 100% fool-proof but at least you want to minimize your sensitive information from being given away easily.
So to achieve all those said above, I have four goals I want to nail down:
1. To prevent my local ISP to sniff the traffic that goes out from my PC when it travels out from it’s network
2. To change the origin of IP address as if it comes from a different country
3. To prevent the web page from collecting information like my OS and browser type
4. To not leave behind any trace in my PC that I have surf that site
The easiest to achieve goal no #4, is to use Google Chrome in “Incognito Window”, that way, no cookies or browser history will be left behind.
To achieve goal no #1, you can use “Hotspot Shield” an advert-support tool that creates a VPN tunnel, so, your local ISP can not see what’s the bits and bytes your PC has been transmitting.
To achieve goal no #2, you can surf behind an anonymous proxy, although some may argue that firing up “Hotspot Shield” is already good enough to achieve this but, what’s the harm of putting another layer of security to make things more secure? But be sure to use the IP checker to make sure the result is the IP address of the proxy.
Lastly, goal no #3, you can surf anonymously by using an anonimizer like http://anonymouse.org, where your OS and browser info get’s fuzzed into something else, also, your IP address got fuzzed up again.
The IP address has been change several time during the course of implementing all this:
87.201.27.xx (IP given by the local ISP)
10.14.176.xx (IP given by Hotspot shield)
64.55.144.32 (IP traced to Hotspot shield, you can verify this from tracert result)
193.200.150.23 (IP given by anonymouse.org)
I have tested this and used Google Analytics to see the outcome after doing all the above and the result is not bad, coming from these tools that is all free. The only downside is probably performance because of all the additional layers of security etc.
Unfortunately, the technology such as these can be a double-edge sword, some people I can imagine may want to post malicious content on a forum or blog and its going to be hard for security professionals like us to trace and investigate.
