"Lying in a featherbed will bring you no fame, nor staying beneath the quilt, and he who uses up his life without achieving fame leaves no more vestige of himself on Earth than smoke in the air or foam upon the water." -Dante Alighieri
So… You want to learn how to be a “hacker”. Hackers tend to be by nature, smart, curious, passionate and determined to find loopholes to worm through. Hacking isn’t what people tend to think hacking is, some individuals might think that hacking is that of smashing random keys in green matrix text and having “granted access” to a companies network, web pages and or emails/passwords. There are a few steps one must take before even venturing off to hacking or attacking an organization.
Anonymity
The first step to any nefarious activities online is to make your self “anonymous” or at the very least hard to pin down. There are several ways that someone can stay anonymous online, let this be through the use of VPNs, Proxies, using Tor, routing all your network traffic through tor, and to use sandbox software, etc. Keeping your self anonymous will protect you against anyone who has an interest in collecting tidbits on you, this might be IP address, a country that you're from, and or real name, age and address. This is a method malicious hacker call “doxing”, doxing is the act of gathering intelligence on an individual, researching their private information on public databases.
So, step one… Use a Virtual Private Network, make sure that the one you use is first trusted, doesn't collect logs on their users, make sure that the company is unlikely to turn over your information to local authorities.
VPNs are an easy and effective way of staying anonymous online, to a certain extent anyway, the second step could also be to use a proxy or proxies (Proxy Chain), these aren’t as secure as a VPN as VPN tunnels are encrypted (not the exit node), so why use a proxy chain? If the authorities can unravel your VPN or trap you by sending you a nefarious link designed to de-anonymize you then all they would have to do is take down one server and then backtrack to you, as for a proxy chain connects to a multitude of proxy servers, so the cops trace your first proxy back to its source, now they have ten more to work through… what a pain! And a waste of time, not to mention labor-intensive.
However, as a hacker you have to assume that the authorities are always watching so by encrypting everything you can will be your best and safest bet, not forgetting to encrypt your communications and your hard drive. So VPNs and proxy chains are one way to go, the next is to anonymise all of your network traffic so that you cut down on your “trail”, “fingerprints”, basically just covering your tracks. Run your network through tor to encrypt the traffic, as you know the exit nodes are not encrypted but the entrance nodes are, the chances someone will be sniffing the exit node is unlikely for a script kiddie like you.
Step two… if you sign in to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, IRC, etc, then make sure you have first hidden your IP at least and then to use a fake name and fake email address. If you're involved in any hacking groups then just remember if one of those individuals get caught then it's likely they will rat you out, so don't give away personal information to anyone, not even “friends”.
The final step to take for basic anonymity is that of safe browsing.. use browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and search engines such as DuckDuckGo. Adding these browser extensions will help in your quest of not leaving much of a trace online. Extensions are as follows:
uBlock Origin
NoScript
Adblock Plus
HTTPS everywhere
Privacy Badger
Cookie Quick Manager
FoxyProxy
Ghostery
User Agent
ClearUrls
Web RTC Blocker
The use of virtual machines is a great way to isolate everything you do online let that be gaming, finances, social media, and basic internet browsing. A virtual machine called Whonix is a great way to help prevent ip leakage.
If there was anything in this post that you don’t understand then don’t forget to DuckDuckGo it.
These are some of the very basic and some of the easiest ways to stay “anonymous” online, however just remember that authorities have money and time to invest in hunting you down.
Now your a bit more anonymous and a tad bit safer online hacker or not. If you want to make your self hard to hack, then use a Unix like system, and make great use of sandbox’s, the one I recommend is FireJail.
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