What is Anonymous Browsing?
Anonymous browsing refers to browsing the web content in such a way that it hides the user’s personal information. An attacker uses this in order to protect his identity during an unauthorized attack. Many of the normal people also wish to browse anonymously due to privacy. For security reasons, they don’t want the people who can see their information like ISP(Internet Service Provider), be able to misuse your information.
Why do we need Anonymous Browsing?
Simply switching on incognito mode in your browser is not enough to keep your data safe online. Even if you are not doing anything illegal doesn’t mean that no one is after your personal information. And this is just not because someone is trying to exploit you through your sensitive information. The main reason is that the companies and other organizations like political parties want it. And the data that they get from your behavior online helps them by giving them the advantage to advertise.
How to browse ANONYMOUSLY?
VPN
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. All a VPN does is take in your data, encrypt the data, and then send it through their network of servers before forwarding it to the destination server. When a VPN sends the data towards the intended destination server, it decrypts the data. It makes it look like the data came from their server rather than your computer.
While a VPN does secure your data in some ways. Your ISP can’t tell what you are doing and allows you to circumvent most of the firewall blocks. But when your data leaves the exit point of your VPN, it’s all still there and can be used to track you. So VPN is just one of the tools, which provides anonymity but not as a whole.
TOR
TOR stands for The Onion Router. The Onion Router is not a physical router as you think of plugging in at your home. Rather it’s an internet networking protocol that’s integrated into the Tor web browser. It is designed to anonymize the data relayed across it. So it keeps your online activity anonymous by encasing your traffic in multiple layers of encryption. Then send it to the number of nodes that peel back those layers one at a time. This makes it difficult not impossible to see your webmail, search history, and other online activity.
Now, Tor is also imperfect and leaves us vulnerable until our traffic reaches its network. That’s why we are using our VPN to mask that initial jump. Using a VPN can be very intimidating, especially if you are specifically being hunted by any government agency. This is because your traffic will have a predictable exit point. But as most of us whose goals are to thwart more causal surveillance, these vulnerabilities don’t matter.
Tails
So until now, the use of incognito mode, plus the VPN and TOR leads to perfect anonymous browsing. But still, if your goal is to have the most ultimate anonymity, you should go for Tails. The Linux based “Tails”, is the operating system equivalent of forgetting everything. The entire OS is built around the Tor protocol and runs all the internet traffic through the Tor network. It is a live OS designed to preserve your privacy. Tails is a free OS, based on Debian GNU/Linux like Kali Linux or Ubuntu.
One of the other key benefits of Tails is that the entire OS essentially runs off on your computer’s RAM. So, when you turn off the system, any data that lingers on it is gone. And there is nothing to match your identity to the last browsing session. Another advantage is that you can take it with you and launch it on any computer with a USB port.
Proxychains
Proxychains are a series of proxies that will anonymize the server. This tool is used by an attacker or hacker to maintain his anonymity. It is the attacks like nmap scans, SQL injections, or online brute-forcing attacks, this will anonymize anything that the attacker does.
The difference between proxies and proxy chains is that proxies are usually found on web browsers and basically minimize HTTP connections. Whereas proxychains will anonymize essentially everything. You use only one proxy to set up a proxy server whereas multiple proxies are used in proxy chaining.
