Anonymous Online

 

ANONYMOUS ONLINE

The universe believes in encryption, a wise man once opined, because it is astronomically easier to encrypt than it is to brute force decrypt. The universe doesn’t appear to believe in anonymity, however as it requires significant work to remain anonymous.  

PRIVACY AND ANONYMITY:  

We are using privacy and anonymity interchangeably, and this is totally wrong. An encrypted message may protect your privacy because no one can read it except you and your recipient. But this doesn’t protect the metadata and hence it doesn’t protect your anonymity. Who are you talking to, when, for how long you are talking, number of messages, the attachment size, the type of communication (text, voice calls, video calls, etc.), all this information are not at all encrypted and can be easily discovered by hackers with sophisticated techniques, phishing attacks, brute forcing, or with a mass surveillance, which is happening most of these days.  

Now a days online anonymity is actually a myth. Meat space and cyber space have merged. Previously we lived in real world and used to go “online”. But now a days we live in “online” and things like geotracking of IP addresses, facial recognition in public physical spaces, IMEI number tracking of cell phones, bio-metric scanning and so forth mean no amount of “online” anonymity will help you if your meat space self is not also anonymous, which is nearly impossible these days.  

Note: Browsing in Incognito mode or private tab doesn’t make you anonymous over the internet.  

SOME PROCESS WHICH PROVIDES ANONYMITY TO ITS MAXIMUM LEVEL:  

Now I am going to discuss some technical ways by which your anonymity will be the maximum. Your actual IP will be hidden and your browsing activities will be anonymous. Now below there is the process which many including myself use to maintain anonymity to its maximum level.  

First of all, get a VPN install in your device. If possible, invest some money in a good VPN because most of the good VPNs are cost effective. A VPN creates a tunnel which hides your IP address and your browsing activities. This varies between different Operating System (OS). OS like Windows have built in VPN. OS like Ubuntu, Mint OS and such others have VPNs which needs to be installed from the Software Manager and Software Centers respectively. Most of them are written in Python and use GTK. In OS like Backbox OS, Kali Linux and Parrot OS you can use Anonymous, which is a VPN that needs to be started from the terminal. You can open this from the Anonymity tab. In Arch based distros and in Mac OS there are similar ways also.  

Secondly use TOR browser. Tor is a free and open source software project for enabling anonymous connection. TOR came from The Onion Routing. While using TOR make sure that the browser is not open in the full window. If you open it in full window then details of your OS and some other details of your system is revealed. You could call this as a bug in the code of the software. The TOR is written in C and Python. So, while using TOR I would personally like to refer to have knowledge in Python, C and JavaScript. If you don’t disable JavaScript in the Tor then you don’t remain anonymous.    

But while using Tor make sure that you don’t navigate to the dark web sites. The dark web sites have .onion extension and have http protocol.  

Truly to say I have been using the Tor browser for months due to some legal work and I have often gone into the dark web for some specific causes. Below I have attached some screen shots which shows some negative places on the Tor browser and the dark web.  

Hence be very careful while surfing the Tor browser. Criminals are on each and everywhere in this place to make you victim. Curiosity is good but if you start using the Tor browser out of curiosity and without prior knowledge about using the Tor, then you would be walking on a mine field, as you could be trapped by the cyber criminals and you could easily be a victim of cyber-crime. The first rule of Tor is to disable JavaScript, next check that you browse only https (hypertext transfer protocol secure) sites and create new circuit relays frequently.  

WHO STAY ANONYMOUS AND WHY DO THEY STAY ANONYMOUS?  

If you are living in a country where there is censorship over the internet then you are required to stay anonymous over the internet. If you are staying in a country where there is freedom of speech and expression then there is no need to stay anonymous. Professionals working in the field of cybersecurity or working in the government organizations dealing in the cybersecurity and especially hackers (all white hat, grey hat and black hat) maintain their anonymity over the internet. If you are a normal user and there is no censorship over the internet in the country then you don’t need all these things. This post is just for educational purpose. This is just the basic things to know how to maintain anonymity over the internet. There are many advance levels also but in that case most of the things are done using the terminal and Linux based operating systems are used. As for educational purpose, I haven’t got into the deep into this topic. While we need to do some real-life tasks in which we need to maintain full anonymity and, in those cases, we perform some more advanced steps and most of those are done in the terminal.