For quite some time I’ve been making use of a dd-wrt modified linksys box on my home network as an openvpn endpoint so that when I’m out and about in the world, I connect the vpn, switch firefox to route through a squid proxy server on the home network and I’ve got a nice fairly secure web browsing setup. But, as they say there’s more than one way to skin a cat. And, that’s what I’ve played around with the last couple days. First off, I guess I should describe the concept. 1) Let’s say that you’re browsing the web at an open wireless access point and you don’t trust the network or 2) let’s say you need to be able to access an intranet web server that is not accessible from the internet side of a network or scenario 3) let’s say a web site is blocking access based on ip address (for instance say you’re behind the great firewall of xyz business/company)…. how can you still manage to access the web pages you want to 3,2) at all or 1) securely with as little snooping as possible.
Tag: tor
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Torbutton – firefox anonymity browser extension
I don’t know if anonymity is exactly acheived, but…. anyway not too long ago I explored/setup tor on my system to play around with, no real reason I suppose, but doing what I do it pays to be aware of many different kinds of software. Tor proxies web requests from your machine through a tunnel to another machine on the tor network – it could be nearby or far away, but it essentially prevents the destination site from knowing EXACTLY where you’re located and can prevent machines in the middle from logging your access (i.e. your isp, or a wireless access point owner.) The problem is – once it’s setup you have to turn it on by changing the proxy settings in your browser – tedious. Well, in comes torbutton, which is a firefox extension to enable routing through tor with the click of a mouse. (You do have to have it setup beforehand (tor and privoxy work well together for that.)
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Anonymized Botnet?
Sans has a story on botnet traffic spotted coming from the TOR network. Now, I had to refresh my memory on what TOR is, but it’s an anonymizing network, essentially a computer running TOR, would collect a list of TOR client machines on the internet and then connections to other pcs are routed through encrypted connections through several different pcs, which masks the origination of the data request. Of course, this doesn’t mean that botnets are actively making use of TOR, it could just be an inadvertant…. “route all my traffic through TOR” computer got a bug….