Protecting My Internet Connection

[c2turbo]

how can protect my online activities ,weather i am playing games ,downloading files ,watching movies or basicly whatever im doing and anything leaving my router or coming into my router ,basicly my privacy when online ! Will ssh do this ,as i dont think vpn is going take care of all of this ? What is need thks and look foreward to getting privacy!

[Infiltrator]

Your could use TOR, for anonymity but it will be slow, for general downloading. Also maintaining a low profile on the internet, will solely depend on you. Things like subscribing on websites or posting personal and other information on social networking sites, can help someone create a profile on you. And if you want to have privacy you will need to learn to limit these things.

Now I must ask this question, why do you want to keep your connection private? Did you do something illegal or planning on doing? This does sound a bit suspicious to me!

[TheLaughingMan]

if you are doing downloads and other weird stuff like that , then vpn will be your best bet to go with. But a word to the wise, look into your vpn service to see what encryption they have, and there privacy rules....some do not keep log on what you do on there servers, other do..just make sure you read the fine print first before signing up if you to this route.

[theyettihunta]

Well if your trying to play it real safe you could always VPN into a single computer network that is fully patched and has a commercially licensed anti-virus. And run that computer through tor with Firefox security addons that warn you about sketchy sites.

Also, look into blacklisting/whitelisting.

You can monitor and block threats of many different connection types this way. Also running black sheep to prevent session hijacking will increase security. No script is another great addon for secure browsing.

Avoid using auto logins and remember me's.

Make passwords complicated using a combination of letters, numbers and characters and use as many different passwords as you can. And never store them on an unencrypted file... if you must digitally store them.

Avoid cloud services... this absolutely is less secure than having hard copies of data because using a cloud service, storing personal files online, means your data that you store in the cloud is sent online every time you download or upload to it, which just opens up opportunity for threats

FIREWALLS: For maximum security firewalls can be configured at a router level and on individual computers. Also, you could dedicate hardware to being a firewall for the the network which is probably the most secure one of the three.

And if your really paranoid use onscreen keyboards for passwords instead of a traditional key board as this can eliminate many ways black hats can exploit users with key loggers.

Sorry to be so thorough, but I wanted you to have some good options on the table.

All that I listed are certainly not the measures a common user takes for computer security, and even if you went through all that trouble to secure your data there are many hackers who if determined enough, would not be detected with 24/7 connection and packet logs.

Oh and on one last side note, If your on Linux you can spoof your Mac address before connecting to the internet, so that if a hacker did manage to trace your ip address he could be greatly delayed in identifying his target machine without the correct Mac address being attached to its outbound connections.

[Infiltrator]

Well if your trying to play it real safe you could always VPN into a single computer network that is fully patched and has a commercially licensed anti-virus. And run that computer through tor with Firefox security addons that warn you about sketchy sites.

Also, look into blacklisting/whitelisting.

You can monitor and block threats of many different connection types this way. Also running black sheep to prevent session hijacking will increase security. No script is another great addon for secure browsing.

Avoid using auto logins and remember me's.

Make passwords complicated using a combination of letters, numbers and characters and use as many different passwords as you can. And never store them on an unencrypted file... if you must digitally store them.

Avoid cloud services... this absolutely is less secure than having hard copies of data because using a cloud service, storing personal files online, means your data that you store in the cloud is sent online every time you download or upload to it, which just opens up opportunity for threats

FIREWALLS: For maximum security firewalls can be configured at a router level and on individual computers. Also, you could dedicate hardware to being a firewall for the the network which is probably the most secure one of the three.

And if your really paranoid use onscreen keyboards for passwords instead of a traditional key board as this can eliminate many ways black hats can exploit users with key loggers.

Sorry to be so thorough, but I wanted you to have some good options on the table.

All that I listed are certainly not the measures a common user takes for computer security, and even if you went through all that trouble to secure your data there are many hackers who if determined enough, would not be detected with 24/7 connection and packet logs.

Oh and on one last side note, If your on Linux you can spoof your Mac address before connecting to the internet, so that if a hacker did manage to trace your ip address he could be greatly delayed in identifying his target machine without the correct Mac address being attached to its outbound connections.

Just adding to that, if you don't want to leave digital traces behind, you could also use a Live Linux distro like, https://tails.boum.org/

Edited April 3, 2012 by Infiltrator