Can I Surf Securely with Anonymous Proxy Surfing ?

Anonymous proxy surfing has become increasingly popular as people using the internet on a daily basis become more and more aware of just how insecure their private information is. While it might sound as if being a computer specialist to safeguard your private information for free online sounds like the truth, in reality it’s something that anyone can do.

So what are the main points of concern to ensure you're surfing securely?

If you want to securely surf the internet, there are a few things that you must be aware of:

1.Web Server Logs that record your IP address 2.ISP Logs that store the IP address of every website you visit 3.HTTP Transport – In most situations web traffic is transferred in a plain text format making it easy to collect and read

How can this be prevented and what are the costs involved? There are different levels of protection provided by either free or paid services.

The easiest thing to protect you from is the Web Server Logs. Anonymous proxy surfing makes sure that the IP recorded by the web servers is that of the proxy, not yours. Using IE (Internet Explorer) makes it very easy to setup use of a proxy server manually. Simply go to Tools --> Internet Options --> Connections --> LAN Settings and simply put in the IP address of the proxy. The difficulty with free proxies is that many of them are gotten through hacking or servers that are incorrectly configured and are unbelievably slow and unsecured.

There is a widely available open source program called TOR that provides you with more security then randomly choosing from a free proxy and hoping it’s not run by Russian Hacking Clubs! TOR has the ability to provide you with a very secure connection but it can be difficult to setup and the speeds are still terrible unless the sites you visit are in a text format only.

The other points of concern require the use of a encryption protocol to bypass. One in particular called Stunnel gives you the ability to encrypt your TCP connection inside the Secure Socket Layer, otherwise known as the SSL. While the program may be free, you need to be very technically minded to setup the program properly, but if you have the time and your just curious you can actually do some experimenting of your own with the program.