I don't do any illegal activities online but I like reading about hacking and other illegal activities and while thats not a crime, big brother is getting nosier and nosier every day and reading about illegal things might be considered suspicious activity and could be used against me. I hear they brought in various new laws in my country, as well as most other western countries which mean that ISPs now must keep logs of all our internet activity and government, LE, and private corporations can access this info whenever they like. So in this day and age, being a ghost is just good practice.
I'll post the tricks I've learned so far, this is probably common knowledge here but I'll explain it anyway so this thread will be useful to noobs. Most people here are far more experienced with IT security than me so can you please share your knowledge.
Setting up ghost profiles: By ghost profile, I mean a collection of email addresses and accounts that have no association with your actual IP address. Meaning you register all the accounts with a proxy IP, and you log into them only with a proxy IP. I used to use tor browser from time to time but it was very slow and I couldn't do things like register accounts anonymously with it. Also it was just a HTTP browser so it didn't work for email, IRC, IM, torrents and other services. Eventually I tried out a free VPN and noticed that its not much slower and it applies to all web services (i.e. email, IM. IRC etc.). So to setup a ghost profile, I need to start from scratch and register new email address and accounts to all the forums and sites I use, that way the IP associated with all these accounts cannot be traced back to you.
Encrypting all your traffic:The first thing I do is install https-everywhere:
https://www.eff.org/https-everywherewhich is a firefox plugin that forces firefox to only browse sites with https protocol rather than http. Obviously it only works for sites that support https and it only works for sites that there have been rules written for. So it works for all the common sites like google and wikipedia which makes it pretty useful.
Tor is an excellent way to ensure that all your web traffic is encrypted, its only decrypted at the end of the chain (when you use tor, your web traffic passes through a chain of computers which are also running tor, it is encrypted every step of the way but must be decrypted by the last computer on the chain before it reaches the website). My problem with tor is that its slow as hell (I have a bad internet connection) and confusing to configure. The easiest way to use tor is to install the tor-browser bundle, dunno about windows but on linux all you have to do is download a file, run it and it sets everything up for you. It only works for browsing webpages, if you need to encrypt other protocols like email, IRC or torrents you need to configure things manually.
The most useful technology I have come across for anonymity and data protection are VPNs. By using a VPN, all traffic from your computer to the internet (which passes through your ISP) is encrypted so the data that gets logged by your ISP will just be encrypted gibberish. Secondly, the IP that websites log when you visit them will be the VPNs IP, which cannot be traced back to you unless the VPN service keeps logs (some of them do so you have to choose the right one, a lulsec member was arrested after his VPN (hidemyass) gave the log files to LE. For info on which VPNs to choose, read this article:
https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/the paid VPNs will obviously be the most secure ones but if you're new to VPNs and wanna test them out before paying for them, there are plenty of free ones. Windows users have plenty of free ones to choose from but the only free one I could get to work on linux is SecurityKISS:
http://www.securitykiss.com/I don't know whether they keep logs or not though. Well thats about all I know. I'm not a hacker so I'm not that well versed in all this, I've just read a lot of conspiracy theories over the years which instilled in me a healthy dose of paranoia that inspires me to up my security.
