Thread: Covering Your Tracks with Proxies

You're being watched. Soz, that's just how it is. Corporations have poured money into the companies whose servers your computer connects to on a daily basis, to monitor your buying habits, and where you go on the internet. Wherever you go, you leave your ip address, which is effectively a fingerprint to trace you by. Your ip address is a number assigned to you personally by your internet provider, so once The Man has it, he can check the logs at your provider, and can trace down your email address, your telephone number, your credit card details, and your home address. Until corporations are held accountable for their actions, they cannot be trusted with your information.

So what can you do about it? You can use proxies.

Now, proxies won't give you total anonymity, but they will help to cover your tracks. One of the benefits of using public proxies is that the public are using them as well as you, so if anyone does try to trace you, they'll have to trace everyone else who used that proxy as well, which is considerably more effort than most people will be bothered to put in.

If we think of an ip address as your fingerprint, think of a proxy server as a glove. It might leave a tiny amount of your (and its own) DNA behind, but on the whole, it will keep your fingerprints off the things that you touch. Again, it's not 100% secure, so don't try any credit card fraud or big time scams like that, but it's good just for day-to-day stealth.

So, where to begin? First of all, you need to know what your ip address is currently. Head over to whatsmyip, and write down the ip address it tells you. Next, you need to find proxy lists. Head onto google, and type 'proxy list'. Click on a few pages, and you'll see reams and reams of numbers, that may well look somewhat like this:

203.190.254.51:80 elite proxy Bangladesh

To explain what this means, the numbers before the ':' are the ip address of the proxy. The number after the ':' is the port via which you'll connect to that ip address. That's all you need, but unfortunately these lists will contain a lot of pointless information that is usually highly inaccurate, so we need to remove it.

I find the best way to do this is to copy the list to a database document, like in MS Excel or whatever. From there, you can easily search and replace words such as 'elite proxy' with a space, and hopefully you'll be left at the end with a list that looks somewhat like the following:

200.252.123.1:6588
200.220.205.40:8080
200.169.27.34:80
200.150.134.78:6588
150.165.15.1:3124
200.247.144.80:8080
200.242.252.12:8080

Save it as a .txt file, with no text formatting. You will need to collect up as many proxies as you possibly can, as I guarantee that the majority of them will not work. This is the fault of spammers.

So, now that you've got this list (let's call it proxy.txt), what do we do with it? We head over to here, and download mutiproxy. Once it's downloaded, open it up, and select Proxy list from the top menu bar, then options. Select the general options tab, and make sure your options are the same as mine:

Once you've done that, click on the 'Proxy servers list' tab, and then Menu -> Files -> Import proxy list... and select 'proxy.txt' wherever you may have saved it. If all goes according to plan, you should be presented with all of the proxies in your text file in a list, with red dots next to them. Click OK, and in the man Multiproxy window, click 'Check all proxies'. This may take a while, so go make a cup of tea.

Once it's finished, go back to Proxy list, Options..., Proxy servers list. Hopefully, a fair few of your proxies will have green dots next to them. This means that you can use them. Don't worry if there are considerably more red dots than green dots, this is perfectly normal. Out of a list of over a thousand proxies, I found only about a hundred actually worked. Click on Menu -> Proxy list -> Delete non-responding. Confirm that this is what you want to do.

Okay, I should briefly let you know how multiproxy works, basically it sets up a server on your computer (don't worry, it's totally safe, only you can connect to it), and it opens up a port for you to connect to via your browser. Once your browser's connected, Multiproxy tells it to connect using one from the list of proxies you supplied.

Nearly there.

The next step is to configure your web browser.

For users of Firefox, go to Tools, Options, General tab, connection settings. Select 'Manual proxy connection', and in the box next to 'HTTP Proxy:', type: 127.0.0.1 and in the port box next to it, type 8088. 127.0.0.1 is the ip address of your computer internally, and 8088 is the port that Multproxy has opened up on your computer (for you only). Click OK.

Now, you should be up and running. But you need to know for sure. Head back over to whatsmyip, and hopefully, if it all worked, it'll tell you that you're using a different ip address.

You may find surfing to be a little slow, or that google comes up with a random foreign google web page, rather than the one you're used to. S-B fucks up sometimes as well, but when any of these situations occur, just have a look at the multiproxy window to see which proxy server you're using. If it sucks, delete it. The great thing about Multiproxy is that it keeps on rotating which proxy servers you use, so any trace that you may leave is scattered considerably further across the globe than it would otherwise have been.

That's about it, you should now be surfing considerably more anonymously than you once were.

If you want to know how to use proxies with file-trading software such as Limewire and WinMX, let me know and I'll write another article, or extend this one a little.

Happy surfing people, stay safe.

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Yes, surely freedom of speech is pointless without the freedom to learn?

Cool sidenote though.