Often people will want to know and will ask me, what would be the best free anonymous proxy to use?  Honestly there is no clear cut answer to that question.  Proxies that appear to be good may disappear from use on the internet within an hour.  So even if I was to recommend a very good fast proxy that would keep you safe online, by the time you got to the end of reading this article it could be gone and no longer be usable.  There is a simple reason that proxies like these never stay live on the internet for any length of time.

First off the cost of bandwidth, that alone can add up to be a large sum of money monthly.  Then taking into consideration the thousands of people wanting to surf the internet using your anonymous proxies, your bandwidth bill is only going to grow and bandwidth is only one part of the costs involved to running a proxy server, there are several other components.  You are probably wondering why if it costs so much, what is the purpose of someone making available free anonymous proxies for the general public to use?

There are two main reasons that free anonymous proxies are set up:

The first is that the owner of the proxy server is not even aware that their proxies are being used by someone else.  This can easily happen by accident when a server is not configured properly, leaving a port open, which then allows all kinds of anonymous connections to the server, instead of only being used for specific users.   Many times the only way a datacenter administrator will know that something is not right is by either the large bandwidth bill, looking at the usage graphs or seeing a massive performance decrease in the server.  Unless you are an experienced tech, this is a mistake that can happen easily.

Now for the real reason and one that should be a major concern for anyone who uses or is considering using a proxy on the internet is … Crime .. Identity Theft.  To these internet pirates everyone’s personal information is very valuable.  Everything from your bank account numbers, credit card numbers, your address, social security number and all your personal account and logins.  And the list goes on.  These thieves will stop at nothing to get your personal information; they seek out servers, usually from large companies and compromise them.  Then they take these proxies they have just stole and list them on websites for people to find and use and then steal all the data passing through that proxy.

Due to the danger of using these proxies the risk is far too great and out weighs all  the benefits.  Remember never use any of your personal or confidential information if you choose to use free proxies.  If your privacy and safety is much more important to you, but you are not able to pay for a secure professional service, then it may be worthwhile looking into TOR.  Although the connection may be much slower than what you are used to, it provides some anonymity although there are still many security issue so it would be best not to use it for secure requirements like online banking and stock trading etc.

As an Internet user you face many dangers online ranging from cyber criminals trying to steal your identity to marketing companies and ISPs tracking and logging your IP address. As a lot of web surfers know, one of the best ways for protecting personal information and maintaining Internet privacy is to use a proxy server. While many useful proxy servers can be found on the Internet simply by searching "proxy" on Google, the age old question that many Internet users have difficulty answering is: What is better to use, anonymous surfing software or free web-based anonymous proxies?

A software-based proxy will run with your current browser and allow you to surf freely without having to go back to a homepage to enter a new URL every time you want to visit a different website. This type of proxy does require the user to download and install the program, but after installation it should only require 1-click to run the program and surf anonymously. A good software proxy will cost you a few dollars a month, which is a downside compared to the free web proxies. There is usually a fee associated because you are getting what you pay for. Software proxies, much like their web-based counterparts, offer anonymous surfing, but also encrypt the data being transmitted. This means that in addition to your IP address being masked, your data and the transmission between networks is also secure, unlike a web proxy. Another positive aspect of software proxies is that your origin is also hidden. A website will see your origin as the last website you visited before coming to them, which can tell them a lot about you if they are tracking your surfing habits. Software proxies also allow you to surf through various domains so that if an IT department does try to spy on you they will only see the fake web URL that the proxy gives them. The proxy will show them you are surfing on officetrainingtips.com, while you are really checking your personal e-mail.

Web-based proxy servers are quite easy to use and require nothing on your part besides an active Internet connection and a web browser. These web anonymizers require you only to enter the URL of the site you wish to visit and give it a click. Your IP address is hidden and replaced with the IP address of the site’s server. This is a great example of proxy avoidance and will get you onto a blocked website, but only offers minimal, if any, data protection and encryption services. The main purpose of the web-based anonymous proxy is to get on websites such as MySpace, Facebook, or any other site that that would normally be blocked by a school or company’s IT Department. Another downside is that this type of proxy is unable gain access to sites that use Secure Socket Layer or Secure Shell encryption, such as banking sites.

Ultimately, both methods of protecting your IP address and maintaining Internet privacy have their pros and cons. At the end of the day if you only need a quick fix to get onto a blocked website that requires no personal information, such as account numbers or passwords, then a web proxy will work for you. Using a software proxy whenever you surf, even if only for a few minutes, would be highly recommended. It is still easy to use and offers much more protection and freedom to surf without the worry of just how protected you are. Since both will hide your IP address it is more important to focus on the advanced protection a software-based proxy can offer you. This factor alone makes software-based proxies, such as Private Proxy, your best bet.

Using a secure proxy server is one vital step in protecting yoruself online.  Unfortunately if you pick an insecure one, you’ll be doing more harm than good.  The world is full of idenity thieves, huge criminal gangs with plenty of resources have realised the huge gains and limited risks of electronic fraud and theft.   The risks are minimal compared to the conventional crime and even less when you can set yourself up in a distant country with lax information laws and ineffective police.   Electronic crime and identity theft offer these huge rewards, those rewards keep growing as a the communication revolution of the internet continues.

One of the main issues is fundamental to your browsing and that is that most of it happens in clear ascii text.  So that’s everything that leaves your computer and travels across the web is instantly readable by anyone who happens to intercept it.   Where can it be intercepted, well the most obvious is the ISP logs which contains a complete log of everything you do online.  There are lots of other places of course but a favourite trick is the free anonymous proxy.  It’s quite simple and very clever simply buy, rent or hack into a server, install some proxy server and them advertise it on the net as a free secure proxy server.  It doesn’t take long before thousands of people flock to use the server and you have lots of clear data flowing through the server.  Swicth it to caching mode or enable some logging software and you can record everything - user accounts, login details, passwords you name it.

A quick and simple way not only to steal personal data but to actually have people send it directly to you in the name of anonymity !

Remember always the adage - ‘you get what you pay for’ - proxy servers cost a lot of money to supply.   A free anonymous proxy quickly gets very expensive, so why would someone pay a fortune to allow everybody to use a free anonymous proxy.   Well the simple answer is they usually do it by mistake and accidentally leave the proxy open, or they do it on purpose and steal your details in payment.

Be very careful that the secure proxy server you choose to protect your browsing is a proper secure professional server not a free one run by a bunch of eastern european hackers.

If you are looking for a high anonymity proxy to allow you to surf in private and protect your identity online then it can be tempting to just latch on to one of the many free proxy lists and simply use one of them. In practice this is often a very frustrating experience as these free proxies are often completely overloaded and extremely slow. Now I don’t know about you but I have no real yearning for the days of surfing the web down a 28.8k modem but the reality can be very similar using one of these free proxies.

The reason is not very difficult to see, bandwidth is expensive and running a fast secure proxy server is an extremely costly business. To offer this service for free obviously will quickly use up lots of badnwidth and server resources.

Have you ever wondered why these people supply free proxy servers ?

I mean it’s very generous of them to supply a valuable resource like this but you must wonder why they are incurring this expense for no gain. Well the answer is surprisingly simple - the vast majority of these so called anonymous proxies are either hacked or misconfigured servers and the real owners have no idea that they are being used like this. In fact often the first time the administrators realise their mistake is when they see their network statistics or bandwidth charges - ouch !

Now of course it is possible that you are willing to overlook this fact and still happily use the free proxy servers but don’t expect speed and certainly don’t expect any level of anonymity. These servers are usually inheritently insecure and in fact often the proxy service is actually installed by hackers or identity thieves in order to intercept passwords and logins. Just remember all your data is going through one place with a proxy server, the administrator has potentially complete access to everything that goes down that connection.

In fact the problem is far from being a high anonymity proxy server these free proxies are just about the most insecure way of surfing the web. Sure, you’ll protect your identity from the web server you visit but not from anyone else and maybe you are really unlucky and pick one of the free hacked proxies run by Eastern European Hacking groups !

One way to protect your self online when surfing the internet is by using a secure proxy server.  But just picking any proxy to use is not advisable, as you might pick one that is not secure and instead of your surfing being anonymous your information might just be being sent somewhere else, which can make this a bad situation for you.  More and more the world and especially the internet are full of people who are waiting to steal your identity.  These internet pirates are not just a single person, but they are an entire huge team that has tons of resources and they realize the huge gains that can be gotten, with very limited risks of getting caught for electronic fraud and theft.  Sad but true, the risks for these thieves are so minimal compared to any conventional crime and even lessens when they set themselves up in a country with lax internet laws and with a government that cannot police the situation.  As the internet continues to grow by leaps and bounds, the rewards for these identity thieves will continue to grow as well.

One of the basic and most important issue while surfing the web is that most information is transferred in easily readable format, called ascii text.  So basically all information that leaves your computer and travels across the internet can be instantly intercepted and read by anyone who chooses to do so.  One place that all internet information is intercepted is your ISP, who logs everything everyone does online, along with many other places.  So to keep what you do online private many people will use a free anonymous proxy.  What this means to you as a user of the internet is that these internet pirates can either buy, rent or even hack into a server and then install their own proxy server and then put them on the internet, advertising them as free secure proxy servers for the general public to use. 

Each and every day thousands of people use these proxies and unknowing to them all their data is being intercepted and read.  With a server configured to cache mode and enabling software these internet pirates can record everything … your usernames, account logins and passwords, your credit card details, social security number, you name it and they have your information.  So they not only give you what you think will protect you, but they are providing themselves with a way to steal all your information in the name of anonymity!

You have probably heard the saying … “there is no such thing as a free lunch”, well that holds true with free proxies as well.  The cost to run a free proxy server is very expensive, so why would they want to give them away free to the public?  The answer here is pretty simple, it is one of two reasons … #1 being that someone, more than likely a company did not close all the ports to their proxy server or … #2 it has been done by someone on purpose to create a trap to steal peoples data

You want to be extremely careful when choosing to use a secure proxy server and that it is from a reputable company that runs a secure professional server.  Not a free service that could very well be run by a team of Eastern European hackers, with only one motive in mind.

Personally I would not know how to find out whether a reputable company is running a proxy server or if it was hackers, but there is  a very good privacy software out on the market now that will allow you to surf and buy safely online.  You will have access to a large network of private proxies to use; the program itself is fast and completely encrypted, allowing you worry free surfing.  There is no better, it is the best on the market.  

 

There’s no exact definition of what constitutes a Secure anonymous proxy or indeed a place you can find one for free on the internet.  But I’d like to add some general points and things to watch out for if you are searching for such a proxy server.

An important fact to remember that simply adding the tag - ninja, elite or high anonymity to the description of a proxy server does in fact have no effect whatsoever on how secure that server actually is.  This might sound an obvious point but I have personally checked a huge list of supposedly ‘Elite proxy servers’ and to be honest my gran could have configured them more securely.

Lets for instance take one of the very basic premises of running a secure, anonymous proxy server - what context is the proxy service running in.  Is this something you know about on proxy servers you have used?

Let me tell you why - the absolute worse thing you can do is run the proxy service as root, yet I see many that are configured in just this way.   The problem is that any flaw, bug or vulnerability with your proxy server could lead to the compromise of the whole machine.  The root account gives complete control of the server, and with it all your browsing, all your logs and any traffic you send through that proxy.  This sounds pretty stupid but you will find that many ‘free anonymous proxies’ that appear in the net are configured exactly like this.

There is a common alternative which runs in the context of the user ‘nobody’, now this is much better as the account has no special privileges which could put the server at risk.    But neither is it a suitable configuration for a high anonymous proxy and the reason for this is that the account will still have some read and write privileges over public areas and directories.  It will also have some rights over all logs created in the context of the ‘nobody’ user meaning potentially all users of the proxy  have potential access to all the proxy logs and files created by this user.

The most secure alternative is what I would expect to see on any highly anonymous proxy and that is that each user has a specific user ID for using the proxy server.  This user account should have no other access rights whatsoever, each proxy session would run in the context of this individual user.   This protects the security, anonymity of every user of the proxy and secures their files and logs from other surfers using the proxy service.

Configuring an anonymous proxy is extremely important, a badly configured and insecure proxy server puts all of it’s users and their information at risk.   Remember whenever you use a proxy server, you are creating a single log of all your browsing in addition to your ISP logs - if it is not secure you will be putting your security at great risk, in fact much more than not using a proxy at all.  If you want a high anonymous proxy make sure you get one.

 

So how can you help protect your privacy online - do I need to use a private proxy? Well actually that depends, there are a few reasons why you should stick to a private proxy to help you decide.

(1) Free proxies - surprise, surprise nothing is ever free, someone always has to pay. The majority of time, a free proxy has been either opened by accident or hacked but the owner will be paying the bandwidth bill until he realises.

(2) Web Proxies - some of these are ok. They will mostly be supported by advertising, so you’ll get a few popups or have to surf in a frame but for occasional use they server a purpose.

(3) Private Proxies are fast - you get what you pay for. If the proxy you are using is very slow (like all the free ones) then you’ll get fed up of using it I remember well surfing on a 28.8k modem and it’s not an experience I wish to repeat.

(4) Hacked Proxies - lots of the free ones are actively run to steal data. Freebie proxy user tunnels all his data through the free proxy where it is logged and filtered for passwords, accounts or identity information.

If you’re looking to surf anonymously, looking to keep your identity secure you have to use a service with a private network of proxy servers. Anything that points you at free servers is a huge security risk, you’d be much safer browsing normally than using a free anonymous proxy if you don’t know who runs it believe me.

I have been surfing anonymously now for a while, the greatest compliment I can give to the software and the private network proxies I use - is that I see no difference in my surfing speed. WHen you consider my connection is also encrypted and compressed that’s definitely worth paying for, not having my entire web history stored at my ISP makes me feel good as well!

I’m often asked the question - what’s the best free anonymous proxy to use.  But the fundamental problem is that there is no correct answer and there never will be.  The reason is that these proxies appear and dissappear on the internet by the hour, I could recommend a super fast proxy to use to stay safe online, but by the time I’d got to the end of this article it could have gone offline.  The reason that these proxies never stay on the internet for a long time is simple.

Bandwidth costs money, I mean real big money, if you have thousands of people surfing rich media content through your anonymous proxy, you’re going to get a bandwidth bill and it isn’t going to be small.   So if opening up a free anonymous proxy on to the internet costs so much money then why do people do it ?

Why do People set up Free Anonymous Proxies?

Well on the whole they don’t, you see the majority of these proxy servers are set up without the knowledge of the owner.  One of the main reasons they appear is by accident, a server is installed and a proxy is misconfigured allowing anonymous connections instead of the specific users intended.  Often the first an administrator will realise is when he notices the huge performance hit on the server or the rather large bandwidth bill arriving.  It is actually a rather easy mistake to make and if you don’t have any experience in setting up a proxy server it can easily be left as an open proxy.

The next major reason for the existence of these open proxies is purely and simply - crime.  You see your data is valuable, your accounts and logins are worth money, goods can be ordered, bank accounts emptied and fradulent transactions completed all under your name.  Identity thieves actively seek out servers they can compromise and install these anonymous proxies, they get the best of both worlds, someone else pays for the bandwidth and they just steal all the data that flows through it.

It’s simply not worth using these proxies, the risk is to great if you do use them, never, ever input personal and confidential information in to your browser when connected.  If privacy is important to you and you don’t have the funds to pay for a professional service have a look at TOR, it’s not perfect and can be very slow but at least it’s legitimate.

 Getting things for free online is just another reason the internet is so popular, but you must be vary cautious when it comes to protecting your identity and staying anonymous. Proxy servers that can provide you with quick and protected services are most times very costly to get access to, so how would you go about finding a free source?

Locating highly anonymous proxies that give you access to the internet and allow you to go where you want safely and privately, protecting your online identity can make free proxy lists a tempting resource. In reality this will end up more of a hassle then you anticipated due to their overuse by other people slowing down your connection. Sometimes the speeds while using free proxies gets so bad that it feels as if you are trapped back in the days when a 28.8k modem was the fastest thing around.

 

It’s not hard to see why running a quick and secure proxy server is so hard to do… it quickly becomes very costly for all of the bandwidth required. If you offer the service for free you will find your server resources depleted very quickly.

You have to ask yourself, how can these people provide free proxy servers then?

While it’s very considerate of them to provide such a valuable service, but there must be a reason why they are doing this without asking for compensation for their expenses. There is a simple, straight forward answer for that… many of the so called highly anonymous proxies come from either server that have been accidentally setup incorrectly or hacked into and the owners have no idea what is going on. The only real sign that this is happening is when the owner sees the statistics and charges that have been incurred for all that bandwidth.

You may be willing to overlook that fact and still use free proxy servers, but don’t expect them to be fast or for any of your personal information to be safe and anonymous. Just the fact that these servers are accessible as free proxy servers means that they were setup by identity thieves or hackers to collect personal information such as logins and passwords. Also remember that the administrator of the server could possibly have total access to all the information passing through their server.

 

Free proxy servers provide you with one of the least secure ways of surfing the internet and are just the total opposite of the highly anonymous proxy server they claim to be. Your identity might be safe from the web server you visit, but if your unlucky enough to get a free proxy server used by Eastern European Hacking groups, it will be the least of your worries.

 

The concept of anonymous proxy lists are great - especially if you are concerned about protecting your privacy on the internet.   An anonymous proxy will  basically act as an intermediary on the internet and forward all your requests for web sites whilst not revealing your IP address or physical location.   Normally your IP address will be stored on the server logs of any web server you access but when you use an anonymous proxy server then it has no record of your location or IP address.

Ok so this sounds good - that is what anonymous proxy servers are for - to protect your privacy.  The big problem and it is a very big problem is that all your data is actually passed through this proxy server usually completely unencrypted - the data is merely forwarded to it’s destination.

Recently a colleague of mine mentioned to me he was using an anonymous proxy in order to access and play online roulette games.  Because his ISP was based in the USA all of the online casinos wouldn’t let him play due to their online gaming laws.  Of course when he used the proxy server his location was actually given as that of the proxy server (Russia in this case) and he was able to play.   He also told me this was much more secure as his internet activities could not be traced back to his IP address and location.

I’m afraid although there is some truth in this, it is far from a good idea.   To use an anonymous proxy you must have 100% confidence in the integrity of the server and of the people controlling this server.  You are passing all your data mostly unencrypted through this proxy in order for it to forward to the web page you requested.    All your information and personal details can be accessed via the administrators of this proxy server - a simple capture like tcpdump will log every piece of data that passes through.

Guess where my friend got his Anonymous Proxy Server List from 

You may have guessed already, it was a list posted on a Russian hacker site.   He was trusting all  his personal information to a proxy server supplied to him by a bunch of Russian hackers.  On a scale of bad ideas it really did rate pretty highly but people do it all the time.   They feel secure by the mere name, anonymous proxy server sounds good doesn’t it until you see Igor sifting through your data one late night looking for passwords and account numbers.  

So if you want to use an Anonymous Proxy Server to protect your identity 

* Make sure it is run by a responsible company or organisation



* Always check the ownership of the anonymous proxy - use a WHOIS lookup to see where IP is registered

* Even be careful about the above - often a server is compromised and used as an anonymous proxy without the owners knowledge

* Never use a proxy from a list found floating about the internet

* Encrypt any data - so it is not readable

I can understand anyones desire to protect their privacy online, there are so many people trying to snoop on our online lives all the way from Governments to hackers, identity thieves and spammers. They all want to know your data for different reasons but it still seems like spying in my book.

Does anyone else feel uncomfortable with the European Data Directive which  states that all our online data (web sites we access, emails records, mobile phone logs) should be stored for up to 2 years by our ISPs.   The UK Government want to go even further and store all this data in a central database presumably so they can find some way to lose the data.  There are suggestions and litigation happening now that suggest the same thing may be happening in the USA as well - visit  the Electronic Frontier Foundation  for details on the cases.

I am sorry but I don’t want hackers, crackers, identity thieves or even my government snooping on what I do on the internet.