Have you ever wondered how to hide your internet activity from the rest of the world? There’s a great open source project called The Onion Router (aka TOR) that can accomplish this very quickly and safely.

You might wonder why one would need to anonymize her traffic. There are many reasons, including (but not limited to) surfing the web in countries where strict filters are in place or maybe you don’t want your ISP to know what you are doing. There are many “unethical” reasons why someone might want to hide their activity but you can’t blame the system because it doesn’t know what your intentions really are. Whatever the reasons may be this software will do it for you and is very easy to set up.

There is a simple program available for download called Vidalia. This installs TOR, Privoxy (local proxy) and TorButton (Firefox add-on to enable or disable TOR at the click of a button). Once you install Vidalia you are basically ready to go.

You’ll find that browsing can be extremely slow at times. This is because of the distributed nature of the system. TOR uses what are called relay nodes and exit nodes to route your traffic to various locations. Each relay node knows only the bare minimum it needs to get the job done. An exit node is where the traffic exits the TOR network and goes out into the wild of the Internet. Exit nodes are needed to bridge the two networks.

TOR also provides what are called “hidden services” and are only accessible to you when you are connected to the TOR network. They provide a means of publishing content, websites, or services that are completely anonymous. An example of a hidden TOR URL is http://vdyrqdwjyx7kfnhy.onion/ (redirected to the TOR Homepage).

Any computer running TOR can be configured as a relay or can run any of the hidden services (http, ftp, etc.). All of the documentation you need to set up a hidden service, relay node, or exit node can be found on the TOR website.

With any service such as this you are bound to stumple upon activities that might be questionable. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the system and some of the people who use it, it prooves nearly impossible to track down the bad guys (honestly, this means that the service is working as designed).

There are other services out there that provide similar services but I believe TOR is the best one. Some of the other services are provided by corporations and fees are involved. This makes me wonder how safe they really are because they must comply with certain requests and may provide user information to the authorities (or other organizations) if required. TOR is completely distributed and does not have any single point of failure so it would be very difficult to shut it down or track down it’s users.

If you are looking for such as service, I suggest giving TOR a try. Just make sure that you follow local laws and regulations as a good citizen would.

Tom Merrit of cnet tv explains how to encrypt and or digitally sign your email using an open source product called The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) as he mentions in this video it appears to be more difficult that it actually is so do not be scared. He uses a MAC and Thunderbird for this demonstration but the process is quite similar on Windows. Enjoy

]]> http://www.themadfatter.com/2008/10/09/how-to-encrypt-andor-digitally-sign-your-email/feed/ 0 http://www.themadfatter.com/2008/03/04/enterprises-dont-know-sensitive-data-flow/ http://www.themadfatter.com/2008/03/04/enterprises-dont-know-sensitive-data-flow/#comments Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:56:15 +0000 TheNerd http://www.themadfatter.com/2008/03/04/enterprises-dont-know-sensitive-data-flow/

I’ve recently taken an interest in a site called Dark Reading. It’s a security news site that reports on just about everything security and privacy related.

Today I found a very good article that talks about a survey being released on how enterprises don’t know where their data is or even how to classify it. This has been one of my pet peeves for some time now. It’s a good read and will hopefully kick start some people’s brains and get a move on in this area. I never understood how an organization can enforce security when it doesn’t even know what it needs to protect.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Most enterprises still don’t know where their sensitive data resides, and less than half of those that do know are actually enforcing its protection, according to new research to be released next month by The 451 Group.”

Cheers!
~TheNerd