Do You Really Want a Free Proxy Server?

Bottom Line – are they secure?

Good question. And easily answered. Free Proxy Servers are not secure. Simple as that. “What about the open resource Tor?” you say. “That’s a good one isn’t it?”

I thought so too. The latest version is really easy to install and run. Using a Vidalia bundle. I installed it on my computer two weeks ago. It ran perfectly. Didn’t slow the computer down at all. No worries whatsoever. And I felt good about dissidents in China, Burma, Iran – places like that – being able to share my server. Gave me a nice feeling everytime I turned it on. And I was running the thing about 16 hours a day. Yeah, sad isn’t it. This is my life.

One night I couldn’t sleep. (This is a true story BTW – email me for the details). I couldn’t sleep so I got up at 3 a.m. and decided to check a Google Adwords campaign I’d just set up. And had the shock of my life when I saw some asshole had got into my account and set up a bogus campaign for a bucket-shop travel agency with a daily spend of €2000 (I live in Paris) – about $3000 isn’t it? They’d already milked €400 in clicks before I shut it down. After consultation with Google we surmised they’d got in through the Gmail account – which is linked to the Adwords account. So I did some research online and look what I found out -

How Safe is Tor?

Tor is pretty safe but there are issues – probably the main one from a security point is that you have little control over where your data is routed. Onion routing systems are often targeted as you can get access to someone else’s data by being an exit node.

Recently a hacker at a Black Hat Security Conference in Washington demonstrated how he got past SSL (Secure Sockets Layer used for credit card transactions etc) on Tor and got into people’s accounts.

He got 254 passwords from Tor users in 24 hours.

To prove his point, he ran SSLstrip on a server hosting a Tor anonymous browsing network. During a 24-hour period, he harvested 254 passwords from users visiting sites including Yahoo, Gmail, Ticketmaster, PayPal, and LinkedIn. The users were fooled even though SSLstrip wasn’t using the proxy feature that tricks them into believing they were at a secure site. Sadly, the Tor users entered passwords even though the addresses in their address bars didn’t display the crucial “https.”

Here’s the source: The Register

Tor is an amazing product but of course has no real funding and private servers which is why it uses the concept it does. Even they admit its limitations – Tor Project.

Many people search for anonymous proxies on the internet to use. They then just surf via these proxies – most are either hacked or accidently acting as proxies – hackers do it deliberately and log everything that goes through these servers – they pick up thousands of passwords, account etc by everyone using them.

So no more Free Proxy Servers for me. What I did was find a really good paid proxy server. One that is completely safe.

This Proxy Server is Bullet-Proof!

It’s called Identity Cloaker and it’s a beauty! With it you can -

* Stop every web site you visit being logged at your ISP

* Block Hackers, Identity Thieves and governments spying on you

* Surf the internet completely invisible at high speed

* Access web resources blocked by firewalls or country restrictions

It’s the very same cipher the US Government uses for Top Secret communications. The US ARMY sends its military orders to Iraq or Afghanistan with it. It’s virtually uncrackable. It’s called AES – Advanced Encryption Standard – Check it out on Wikipedia

Identity Cloaker uses a private network of high speed secure proxies, which means not only are you completely anonymous, but you suffer none of the slow speeds and restrictions of other programs. Especially those shitty free ones.

You can get a FREE DEMO of Identity Cloaker. Click Here to Get a FREE DEMO of Identity Cloaker

Identity Cloaker is €6.66 (about $9) a month. With no automatic rebilling bullshit. These guys are ethical, not sharks. They also have a 14 day money-back guarantee. 30 cents a day for completely secure internet surfing? It’s a no-brainer.

You can choose a Proxy to use from a huge list – and from that point on you will appear to come from that country. This is how you can use a different proxy to bypass individual country restrictions – e.g gambling sites that block US citizens.

You can choose a particular country or get Identity Cloaker to switch automatically every few minutes for extra security! Let’s see those bastards try and hack me again!

I wouldn’t much around with those crappy “Hide your IP software” stuff you see advertised. Or the simple software programs that route all your browsing through the insecure and slow free anonymous proxies. They’re way off the pace.

Here’s some more stuff I like about this Identity Cloaker.

* Fast – currently over 30 privately owned servers in 5 countries UK, USA, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden.

* Very secure – it protects your connection by encryption (SSH tunnel) – plus all the servers are highly anonymous.

* Logs are deleted from proxies and memory within minutes.

* Program can switch between proxies automatically.

* User-friendly – little windows GUI to connect in task bar.

* You can run it on a USB stick (to encrypt your browsing when travelling).

* You can run it at work to protect your browsing (various reasons – it can piggy back work-proxies to punch through firewalls, it can install without local administrator rights, it mimics SSL port as more likely to get through a firewall).

* You can use it to bypass country or site restrictions – e.g use it to stream BBC IPlayer from the UK, or Music/TV sites from the US (Pandora for instance), or access Casino sites (banned to most US surfers).

Don’t forget – Free anonymous proxies are extremely unsafe (loads run by identity thieves on hacked servers – who capture and steal your data) – most are on stolen servers anyway.

Proxies by themselves do very little as all your web logs are stored in ISP (European Directive that they must be kept for 2 years so Govt can check on you – same happening in US but they check anyway). You are also trusting the proxy with all your data.

Click Here to Get a FREE DEMO of Identity Cloaker

Tomas France the developer behind Identity Cloaker has this to say about it -

Identity Cloaker is a technologically advanced “Internet Privacy and Anonymity Protection Service” designed to be easy to use even for a complete computer newbie, yet offering a very high level of protection and versatility demanded by power-users.

Identity Cloaker protects the user’s privacy and anonymity on the Internet by encrypting all transmitted data and disguising the user’s IP address, employing a network of private anonymous proxy servers, SSH tunneling and the OpenVPN Virtual Private Networking technology combined with virtually unbreakable 256-bit AES military class encryption.

Identity Cloaker is not just another proxy switcher! However, it can be thought of as a much more advanced replacement for one. Identity Cloaker also supports portable installation – it can be launched directly from a USB Flash Drive or memory card, without the need to install anything on the PC and it does not need a Windows account with administrative rights.

If you want a Real Review of Identity Cloaker – not those bogus ones you see under “Identity Cloaker Review” on Google – whip across to the respected Internet marketing forum “Warrior Forum”

Tomas France also went in to more detail there -

As for the encryption, proxy switchers use no encryption whatsoever, standard proxy servers do not use it either. The reason Identity Cloaker uses encryption lies in its very core design. Do you know what SSH is? Take a look at Secure Shell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for some brief explanation. It’s a network protocol which is commonly used for remote administration of remote computers/servers (mostly Linux/Unix).

With SSH you establish a secure channel, or “secure tunnel” between your computer and the destination server. This secure channel is encrypted to prevent data eavesdropping.

Wikipedia actually says “Since SSH-1 has inherent design flaws which make it vulnerable (e.g., man-in-the-middle attacks), it is now generally considered obsolete and should be avoided by explicitly disabling fallback to SSH-1. While most modern servers and clients support SSH-2, some organizations still use software with no support for SSH-2, and thus SSH-1 cannot always be avoided.

In all versions of SSH, it is important to verify unknown public keys before accepting them as valid. Accepting an attacker’s public key as a valid public key has the effect of disclosing the transmitted password and allowing man-in-the-middle attacks.”

So Identity Cloaker goes even further. Tomas France explains -

In the case of Identity Cloaker, the cipher used for the encryption is 256bit Rjindael or more commonly called 256bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard).

This cipher is not dissimilar to the one used by the US Department of Defense for Top Secret classified data, it is the very same one! Really, this is no marketing strategy, this is a fact. It’s the very same cipher, including cipher strength, the US Army uses for sending military orders to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Click here to read the Wikipedia entry on AES

Identity Cloaker first connects to one of the dedicated servers in its network via this secure channel. Then it uses so called “port forwarding” to forward a local network port on your PC to a port on the server on which the proxy server software is running.

So you do not connect to the proxy server directly. You connect to the server via SSH and the server then forwards your requests to the proxy server software running on it. You gain all “web access rights” of the dedicated server. If the server can access someblockeddomain.com, so can you. This is similar to standard proxy servers but this time it happens on a lower level.

Technically, I used existing technologies. SSH Tunneling (or OpenVPN for that matter) is not a new thing. But their practical use (especially for SSH Tunneling) would normally be outside of reach for like 99.8% of people because of the complexity.

Click Here to Get a FREE DEMO of Identity Cloaker

And I love this bit. Tomas says -

“Honestly, I am not afraid of competition. There is none.”