17 Actions for Staying Anonymous on the Internet

Prerequisites:

• Physical: Laptop, debian or other Linux install file
• Software: gcc, g++, make, libncurses5-dev, patch, srm, tor, proxychains, ssh, pidgin, pidgin-otr, wpa_supplicant, mac-address-changer

Here, we will discuss a great number of things you can do to keep yourself as anonymous as possible. I would recommend doing these actions if you intend to keep everyone off your heals, including Big Business, Government, and otherwise. I will agree that this setup is not ideal for day to day regular computer usage, but you may want to accomplish these tasks on a PC you use to do your covert tasks.

Note:

You may be able to accomplish some of this on an apple computer running OSX as well, however I have not tested hard disk encryption & you may still be vulnerable to any new safari vulns that come out; but you should be “mostly” safe provided you do a few things covered in an upcoming tutorial next month.

1. Do not use an SSD, use a normal drive, look at raptors if you need speed
2. use/install debian, or a derivative.
3. When installing, choose to use encrypted LVM (for hard disk encryption), you will have to google the setup if you are not familiar with it, it is often used with RAID, but that is just one option. You can certainly do it with a standalone disk.
4. Do not install any un-needed software or services (such as a gui) unless you absolutely have to, and in such situations, go for the most minimal install. Examples of lightweight gui’s: xfce, fluxbox,enlightenment 
5. If you can, build a custom kernal that only has the modules you need for your system. Use a custom kernel to keep your box secure (don’t forget to turn on grsec after installing).
6. Make sure your system is secure & has no services turned on or accessible from the outside.
7. Use TOR, you can view some examples here but because the tutorial was written for a different linux distro you may have to do some googling or ask questions here to avoid the dns caching issue.
8. Route connections and traffic through tor or other servers using sshor proxychains, or your favorite software for doing so.
9. Preferably, use open access wifi networks to hide tracks (if you are worried about developing a pattern you need to have a script which will change your laptops mac address & hostname each bootup) ***hint*** the farther you can be from the wifi access points (bigger antenna) the better.
10. Only talk online using encrypted forms of communication such as:pidgin+OTR or apple’s adium which has encryption builtin.
11. Use IPtables for blocking questionable IP addresses/IP ranges that you don’t want hitting/talking to your box.
12. Use an encrypted email service such as hushmail, but definitely not yahoo or msn.
13. Use pgp.
14. If you don’t like using lynx as a web browser and have to install a gui & decide to install mozilla or something as a browser, you should use something that blocks bad scripts such as noscript. Granted if you are worried about anonymity you shouldn’t also be worried about seeing the latest youtube video & shouldn’t have things like javainstalled, but noscript will help to block some of the adware. While the majority of the ads & malicious code is written for windows, it should help keep your box safer.
15. Do not use the same alias for everything! Use different aliases for different things such as email, instant messaging, irc, etc… & do not tie them together by listing them as info for each other. (You may end up having a ton of accounts to keep things separate, but it’s the best way)
16. You may also want to look into removing yourself from various websites to include background information sites. We have talked about this in different forums & here are some links to help:
    Removal Link #1
    Removal Link #2
17. Should you for any reason ever need to destroy anything, linux’s SRM is the preferred method, as well as dban, both of those provide good software deletion capabilities but can take a while. Physical destruction of the ram first then the hard drive is an option too.

So, there it is folks… Just a thrown together list. Please add additional comments below to help others with methods and actions that I have not mentioned. Stay tuned in the future for more about anonymity.

Categories: Hacking tutorials, Proxy Vpns, tips and trick