A primer on how to be untraceable on the internet
Posted: Sat Mar 09, 2013 2:55 pm
*** Disclaimer** This is a quick and dirty approach. It is not the only approach, nor the best approach or an infallible approach, but it is an approach that would be sufficient for most activities.
How many of us have watched on television where the law enforcement officials "trace" an hacker back to where he is sitting by pushing the trace button of their handy dandy hacker tracking kit? Real life does not work like that. In real life 90% of users actual IPs are dynamic and NATed, not static and internet routable. At most the trace could go back to the ISP NATing the actual address at which point a search warrant would be required, and an ISP that logs.
This is a primer on how to make such discovery more difficult.
1. Purchase a disposable walmart visa card for $100-200. Pay cash for this purchase. Buy it in a neighboring state during you next vacation. Purchase it during peak business hours. Register it using some of the techniques regarding wifi that will follow, and use fake personal information if required.
2. Use the visa card to subscribe to 2 international proxy services and one international hosting service. Again use fake personal information if required and follow the wifi rules below. Pick countries that have cold relationships with your physical country of residence (in my case the USA) and where an international subpoena is going to be met with indifference, legal questions or a bureaucratic wall (suggestions: PRC, Russia, various Northern European countries, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba... you see the pattern?). Purchase the proxy and hosting service with companies that guarantee anonymity and who do not log, all 3 in different countries. This will require compliance in 3 international subpoenas for legal discovery.
3. Use the hosting service to set up a port forwarding ssh tunnel between the proxies.
4. Now for all the above and any subsequent communications do the following.
a. Always boot your system off of a knoppix disc. The knoppix disk will not mount your file system but will instead create a virtual file system in ram, that will mostly disappear each time you power off your system.
b. Always change the mac address for whatever interface you are connecting with to the internet (learn linux).
c. Initiate all of the clandestine sessions from an open wifi connection. Invest in a good antenna that will let you sit in your car and associate with the wifi network from several hundred yards. Rotate where you are connecting at. If one day you use a Starbucks, the next use McDonalds. Downtown areas and universities will generally be hotbeds for unsecured private owner wifis. Use them. Again the good antennae will let you do this from distances, a real good setup will extend your range into miles.
d. Never connect for more than an hour or at a time. Move locations, randomly. Small rotations one day, and the next a "different" base area several miles away. If you are really paranoid hop around major cities.
5. Employing the guidelines of step 4 connect through the wifi to your first proxy, then initiate the ssh forwarding through the host server to the second proxy.
6. Do your business.
What does this mean in terms of anonymity? To track your communications back to you, someone tracking you will first track back to the first proxy. That is as far as they can trace you ip back as it is NATed behind the proxy server. With a host in a country that has a bad relationship with the trackers the tracking most likely end here. If the proxy service really doesn't log the proxy routing information then tracking dies here. If not the trace then goes to the forwarding host in a second country, and then the 2nd proxy server. At each point the varying geolocations adds another layer of complexity and bureaucracy to the tracking.
For most mundane situations the wifi hopping will be sufficient. You just have to be religious in your habits. One slip up and a connection through your home address, and you are outed.
The communications initiation through a public wifi using a masked mac on knoppix means at most they can track you back to the wifi hot spot, and have nothing besides for the radio waves to tie you into the session. As you mac address is changed, and your file system is clean, short of physically catching you in the act (triangulating on your wifi radio signal), there is little more to trace.
There are dozens of other of methods for net anonymity, like compromising systems around the world and using them as session relay points, disposable smart phones, etc etc, so this is not the only method, but it is A method.
Your mileage may vary, pick a personally acceptable level of paranoia, investigate TOR routing yada yada yada.
How many of us have watched on television where the law enforcement officials "trace" an hacker back to where he is sitting by pushing the trace button of their handy dandy hacker tracking kit? Real life does not work like that. In real life 90% of users actual IPs are dynamic and NATed, not static and internet routable. At most the trace could go back to the ISP NATing the actual address at which point a search warrant would be required, and an ISP that logs.
This is a primer on how to make such discovery more difficult.
1. Purchase a disposable walmart visa card for $100-200. Pay cash for this purchase. Buy it in a neighboring state during you next vacation. Purchase it during peak business hours. Register it using some of the techniques regarding wifi that will follow, and use fake personal information if required.
2. Use the visa card to subscribe to 2 international proxy services and one international hosting service. Again use fake personal information if required and follow the wifi rules below. Pick countries that have cold relationships with your physical country of residence (in my case the USA) and where an international subpoena is going to be met with indifference, legal questions or a bureaucratic wall (suggestions: PRC, Russia, various Northern European countries, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba... you see the pattern?). Purchase the proxy and hosting service with companies that guarantee anonymity and who do not log, all 3 in different countries. This will require compliance in 3 international subpoenas for legal discovery.
3. Use the hosting service to set up a port forwarding ssh tunnel between the proxies.
4. Now for all the above and any subsequent communications do the following.
a. Always boot your system off of a knoppix disc. The knoppix disk will not mount your file system but will instead create a virtual file system in ram, that will mostly disappear each time you power off your system.
b. Always change the mac address for whatever interface you are connecting with to the internet (learn linux).
c. Initiate all of the clandestine sessions from an open wifi connection. Invest in a good antenna that will let you sit in your car and associate with the wifi network from several hundred yards. Rotate where you are connecting at. If one day you use a Starbucks, the next use McDonalds. Downtown areas and universities will generally be hotbeds for unsecured private owner wifis. Use them. Again the good antennae will let you do this from distances, a real good setup will extend your range into miles.
d. Never connect for more than an hour or at a time. Move locations, randomly. Small rotations one day, and the next a "different" base area several miles away. If you are really paranoid hop around major cities.
5. Employing the guidelines of step 4 connect through the wifi to your first proxy, then initiate the ssh forwarding through the host server to the second proxy.
6. Do your business.
What does this mean in terms of anonymity? To track your communications back to you, someone tracking you will first track back to the first proxy. That is as far as they can trace you ip back as it is NATed behind the proxy server. With a host in a country that has a bad relationship with the trackers the tracking most likely end here. If the proxy service really doesn't log the proxy routing information then tracking dies here. If not the trace then goes to the forwarding host in a second country, and then the 2nd proxy server. At each point the varying geolocations adds another layer of complexity and bureaucracy to the tracking.
For most mundane situations the wifi hopping will be sufficient. You just have to be religious in your habits. One slip up and a connection through your home address, and you are outed.
The communications initiation through a public wifi using a masked mac on knoppix means at most they can track you back to the wifi hot spot, and have nothing besides for the radio waves to tie you into the session. As you mac address is changed, and your file system is clean, short of physically catching you in the act (triangulating on your wifi radio signal), there is little more to trace.
There are dozens of other of methods for net anonymity, like compromising systems around the world and using them as session relay points, disposable smart phones, etc etc, so this is not the only method, but it is A method.
Your mileage may vary, pick a personally acceptable level of paranoia, investigate TOR routing yada yada yada.