How Do Hackers Hide Their IP Address?

 

 

Hackers are known to use various techniques to hide their digital footprint making it difficult for the authorities to sniff them out. In this article, we will study the various methods in which the hackers hide from prying eyes using various cloaking techniques.

Remember, these techniques are also used by common Internet users who love their privacy to remain invisible online. There are quite a few people who prefer the rest of the world staying in the dark about their activities. It might be individuals from a nation that represses internet access to someone wanting to access a series on Netflix that’s not available in their country yet.

Here are the various ways in which hackers hide their IPs from authorities.

 

No matter what your level of expertise with technology, a proxy is by far the go-to to hide your information on the Internet. For those unfamiliar with proxies, a basic idea of how they work, a proxy will reroute your connection from via a third party server so the website you access will not be able to read data specific to you. 

 

For example, A lives in England but uses a proxy server based in Germany to access a website W. Now the website, while accessing user information will find user A accessing their site from Germany instead of England. This is just an example, in reality, the proxy will hide all of your information from the resources you access. Any server on the other end will only get the information that you provide.

 

There are plenty of free and paid proxies available. Although a word of caution. If you intend to use a proxy to carry out some serious work, its recommended to stay away from a free proxy for the sheer number of individuals that will be using this free proxy at any given time. If you do manage to get a stable connection, it’ll last for a short while.

Some popular proxies:

TOR- The Onion Router is another popular method used by cyber-criminals to hide their tracks. The Tor network in simpler terms sounds like a proxy on steroids. The network will bounce your connection across multiple points to provide a high degree of anonymity. 

 

Their network contains multiple tunnels across the globe, that are used to bounce the users signal. The network is accessed from the Tor browser and websites on the network have a specific address that you need to know to be able to access them.

While it does provide anonymity, one should also note the threats from using the network. Being anonymous also means the people you interact with are anonymous. Also noteworthy is the fact that though the network is secure, the browser itself isn’t. The Tor browser is just a variation of the Firefox browser and is susceptible to everything Firefox is susceptible to.

 

A virtual network provider will be the next level of security. A VPN basically extends a private network over the public Internet, which in turn scrambles the data passing between you and a web server leaving it useless for anyone trying to access it. 

While it doesn’t prevent someone from attacking your machine directly, it does a pretty good job of hiding your identity. Using a VPN in combination with any of the two mentioned methods might offer you the best possible way to hide your identity on the Internet.

 

One should note however secure these options may sound, there is always a thin possibility of someone tracking your machine. even with all 3 of these options, one can still manage to send a malware to your machine or simply try and track down your MAC address. 

 

 

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