Our company has been contacted by users more than once with the question, how safe is the Mac OS operating system? Does it have viruses? Is it possible to track which resources were visited?
This article is the first in a series Mac OS security, in it we will describe the basics of Internet security, prohibit sites from writing "strange data" to our computer and prevent our location from being tracked.
In order to have fewer questions about why and what is being done, we will start with the theory, but we will not delve into it much, because in some places it can be difficult and confusing, so we apologize to experienced administrators and users for sometimes rather rough simplifications.
So: each computer on the network has its own identifier, the so-called ip address. This address contains service information without which our computer will not go online. Roughly speaking, the entire Internet is based on these ip addresses. But, as we all know from school, any information can be used both "positively" and "negatively".
Your ID will change based on location. For example, at work you have one ip, another at home, a third at the dacha, but one thing remains unchanged - with the help of your ip you can determine the location. For example, you went to the site wikipedia.org. The creators of Wikipedia immediately know what address you came from, which means they know the approximate, or even the exact location, Wikipedia is a reliable site that has been tested for years and more than one million users, but what to do with another hundred sites that you visit in a day? How do they use this information?
For lovers of experiments, we offer laboratory work:
Go to the site 2ip.ru - a service whose main function is to show the ip address and other data.
What you will see:
- your ip
- provider
- operating system
- browser
- browser version
This information, which is already minimum about you already know the owners of the sites you visit. What can be done with this information?
Almost the key indicator is the “Where are you from” field. Clicking on it will show us our approximate location.
By the way, if he showed not exactly, as in my case, then you can’t relax, because there is always another way - the human factor. An attacker can go to your provider and, for a certain, insignificant amount of money, ask the administrator on duty for information at what address your ip was provided at such and such a time.
Also pay attention to the "History" item on the site 2ip.ru, which has already become a favorite. By clicking on it, it shows from which ips it was previously accessed:
How does he know this? It's all about the so-called cookies. They were invented by the creators of the first Netscape Navigator browser. Cookies are small files that are stored on our computer. These files contain information about:
- What sites did we visit?
- Which pages on this site have been visited
- The site we visited assigns a unique identifier to our computer, for example 8jladwuuuee9283cnenhceiqj8910 and writes it to us in cookies
- Other proprietary information
How can this harm us? As mentioned above, any site that we visit assigns us a unique identifier, and at the same time that he knows our ip and location, you can track almost all the places we visit, provided, of course, if we go to this site .
To make it clearer, I will give an example: I like to read articles on Wikipedia. I go to the site from the office to read the meaning of some words, from home to see the filmography of Bruce Willis, and sometimes I go from the dacha to see how best to grow hybrid tea rose. Accordingly, Wikipedia knows 3 of my locations and we can assume that:
- First this work because I was looking for the meaning of the word "baseDN"
- The second is my home address because I logged in at 21:30 and was looking for entertainment material.
- And the third is my country house, because I was looking for material on the weekend, from a different address, information about roses.
By the way, Wikipedia is almost the only site that does not write cookies to our computer, and Google turned out to be the most annoying in this regard, which records not only when you went to their site, but also through other resources on which the computer is located. For example, a search from google or a plug-in for the social network Google +
The consequences, I think, are not worth describing. Any owner of the site you visit can determine where you are.
So what to do? How to hide your location? First, we will teach our browser not to write cookies and caches. To do this, before surfing the Internet, open the Safari browser and activate the "private access" function by clicking on the top left corner of the screen Safari->Private access.
Thanks to this simple button, the browser forcibly cuts off all attempts to write cookies and caches to your computer. But, as always, there is a fly in the ointment in the ointment - the history of visits, passwords from sites, search history will not be saved either. What the program will immediately warn us about when this function is enabled
If you did everything correctly, then when you go to the site you will not see the “History” item.
The next step to protect against intruders is to change your actual ip. To do this, we need the free program Hotspot Shield Follow the link, download and install the free version of the program. In the future, if you use it often, the program can be purchased for $29.95, which will make pages load faster.
After installing the program, in order to change our ip, we just need to launch Hotspot Shield from the program folder on your computer.
It will automatically make the necessary settings and establish a connection with an external server.
PS: To prevent the permanent window from hanging on the screen, you can minimize it by clicking on the yellow button in the upper left corner of the window.
Let's go back to the site and make sure that the ip and provider we now have is completely different. And accordingly, our “address” has also changed.
Uncheck all boxes except "Delete all website data" and click "Reset"
SurfEasy VPN: Proxy Server- Hides your IP address and geographic location.
Do not trust your privacy on the Internet to the first person you meet! Many companies claim to offer free VPN services and also promise to keep your Wi-Fi connection secure. But do you know what happens to your personal data when these companies get access to it? Download SurfEasy VPN.
Anonymous VPN by SurfEasy offers you secure, unlogged web surfing with top-notch security that protects your personal information and encrypts all data in transit. Stay safe on all your Android devices. SurfEasy offers an easy-to-use VPN that keeps you completely secure online, protecting you at home, cafes, airports, schools, and anywhere you go. Up to five devices can be connected.
Peculiarities:
- Online user support.
- Wi-Fi hotspot protection.
- Encryption of all traffic on your device
- Your online activity is not recorded.
- More than ten countries, including the US and the UK.
- Ad blocking (premium feature).
- Fast and reliable professional network.
With SurfEasy VPN you can:
- Hide your IP address and geographic location.
- Imagine that you are in the US or a dozen other countries.
- Browse websites anonymously and avoid being tracked.
- Access blocked sites from anywhere in the world.
- Bypass firewalls to surf the web without restrictions.
- Unblock your favorite sites and apps.
Choosing a VPN provider is possibly one of the most important things you will ever do online. Protecting yourself online is what separates the enjoyment of safe Internet surfing from the vulnerable state where all your data can be hacked. Protect your online experience by choosing the right VPN service. Choose a reliable VPN. Choose a reputable VPN. Select SurfEasy.
Download SurfEasy VPN: Proxy Server for Android you can follow the link below.
We all know that there are pages and applications that work differently based on the characteristics of your phone or even location. As an example: a large number of applications work only in the United States, that is, in order to use them, you have to move to the States? Today we will tell you how to hide your GPS coordinates, and you can do it quite quickly and easily.
The Android system makes it quite easy to fake your GPS location, you don't need to have programming skills for this, since this feature is available now for most versions of Android, regardless of manufacturer. Below we describe the process, which consists of only four steps.
1. The first thing you should do to change your location on Android is to become a developer. No, this does not mean that you have to spend years learning the code - you just need to activate the options for developers in the Android menu.
As shown in the picture, go to Settings > About device > enter the build number 7 times until you get confirmation as shown in the picture.
2. When you have enabled this, go back to settings, and right above “Settings”, a menu will be available: Developer. It is there that you will find the option: Allow mock locations, that is: Allow mock locations (tick).
3. Now you have to install a special application, we advise you to use: Fake GPS Location Spoofer Free. We go to the application, you will need to turn off WiFi.
4. In the menu, select the item: only GPS.
Now you just have to choose a place on the map. Thus, applications and the browser will think that you are in the place that you have chosen.
You can also pick up a case for your phone at this address, because in addition to the decorative function, it will prevent the phone from deforming during falls.
A situation may arise when you need to hide your real location, or, for example, indicate a false one. You don't want your friends or family to know where you are. You may be asked to send coordinates via iMessage, and also be tracked using the Find My Friends app. On the iPhone and iPad, it is possible to replace your location: iOS allows you to send the geolocation data of a device that is located on the other side of the city or even the country.
So, now we are in a nightclub, but we want everyone to be at home. For this trick, you will need another Apple gadget running iOS 8 or higher, connected to the same account.
After all the manipulations are completed, you just need to leave the tablet anywhere and remotely send data from it.
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Almost every Internet user sooner or later faces the problem of how to hide your ip? In order to understand how to do this, first let's define what it is and why it is necessary.
What is my ip?
Everyone knows that every computer on the Internet has an address. Many even know that it can be either static, i.e. permanent, or dynamic (changing with each connection). Why is this information needed?
First of all, you need to know it when playing some online games. Not all of them have their own server, therefore, knowing each other's addresses, participants can communicate directly with each other. Thanks to the knowledge of your address, it becomes available to set up the protection of various online services. Many Internet banking and payment systems programs make it possible to limit actions in the account to a "white" list of addresses. A number of programs, especially communication programs, use such addresses for direct transmission of correspondence to the addressee; for their manual configuration, you need to have this information.
You can easily find out the IP address. A number of special services operate directly on the network, which will almost instantly determine the location of your computer and the value of its address. Having figured out what an ip-address is, let's talk about why it needs to be hidden. There may be several reasons for this.
Reasons to hide your address
1. This desire to visit a number of sites anonymously, so that they do not know about it (by ip-address, anyone can easily get a number of information about the computer and its owner, for example, information about the operating system and browser installed, city and country network connection, through which provider, etc.).
2. Strengthen the protection of a computer on the network (for a good hacker, it is elementary to steal important information by ip-address, such as passwords for accessing personal accounts of sites and electronic wallets used, view correspondence and a number of other information located on the computer).
3. Urgently download the necessary or just interesting file, and the place where it is stored reports that you have connected to it too many times and therefore the connection is possible only later, after some time, and there is no desire to wait.
4. The moderator on the required forum has closed access from your address for violating certain rules and now there is no access to posting at all. Here you can, hiding the address of the computer, simply register again on the forum. And now you communicate without breaking the rules, and if you have broken it, it is easy to change it again.
How to hide computer ip address?
When a computer browser loads any web resource, it sends its address to the web server, its custodian, so that it knows to whom to send information in response. Therefore, in order to hide your address, the computer cannot be connected to the resource directly. How to hide your ip, what is needed for this? For this purpose, a computer
connect through another intermediary computer, by connecting to which we force it to connect to the website of interest to us. This will tell the web server that the connection was made not from the address assigned to your computer, but from the one to which it connected. In this way, the real address of the computer is hidden. Having understood its essence, we can move on to methods that allow us to do this.
Methods by which you can hide your own computer address
Let's figure out how to hide your ip? To do this, you can use the browser settings or special programs. Accordingly, there are 4 methods by which it is possible to hide your address:
2. Use online services.
3. With the help of a special program.
4. VPN connection.
Manual browser settings
The setup is done in three steps:
1. Find sites with lists of proxy servers.
2. Enter the address in the browser settings.
3. Check the server for operability.
By typing the appropriate query in the search engine, we get a fairly large list of response sites. By selecting and opening any, we will see a list with such servers. To eliminate the "dead" usually there is a "Check" button. But even this does not guarantee their performance; later they need to be checked manually. The results of the check are summarized in a table, so you get working proxies. Then they need to be set as a proxy server in the browser. This setting is different in different browsers. Let's consider a regular Internet Explorer browser. As an example, we use the address 193.15.24.11:80. Open Internet Explorer, in the top menu in the "Tools" item, select the "Internet Options" tab. In the next window, on the "Connections" tab, select your Internet connection and click the settings button. In the new window that opens, next to the item about using a proxy server to connect, put a birdie. After that, the fields "Address" and "Port" become available, we fill them with the values 193.15.24.11 and 80, respectively. Clicking the OK button twice completes the proxy server setup. To check the performance, go to the site for determining the ip-address and location. If the page failed to load, then the proxy used is not working and you need to select the next one in the list, if the page displays a map that shows your current location, then you made a mistake somewhere or the server is also not working, otherwise everything works correctly .
Special Internet Services
How to hide your ip with them? Using them is very simple. Download a special site, enter the address of the site of interest in the appropriate form field and work. Now the address of the anonymizer site is fixed in the specialized files of the site instead of the real address of your computer. By clicking on the links to the pages you are interested in, you again get to the next page again with the help of an anonymizer site. This method, although simple, has a number of disadvantages. Many of the required sites are paid. There are, of course, free ones, but in this case, when displaying pages, they insert into their body
a number of ad units with different size and frequency of occurrence. The addresses of these servers are well known and blacklisted by services that divide visitors by their place of residence or keep records of detailed information about visitors. Such sites are not available for the anonymizer site. In addition, an anonymizer site usually announces itself that it is an anonymizer. That is, the site cannot identify you. And the fact that you are using an anonymizer is elementary. Therefore, when it is necessary to introduce yourself as a foreigner, these sites cannot be used. There are many examples of such sites. They block the installation of cookies, the execution of Java scripts. They do not require money, practically without advertising. The owners of these sites have developed specialized panels that allow you to use the services without going directly to the sites.
Using special programs
If you are not satisfied with the use of anonymizers to hide your address, you will have to search for proxy servers manually, as described above. How to hide the ip address of a computer more effectively? This is what special
programs. There are a lot of them, and it is almost impossible to describe them all. Most of them have weak functionality hidden behind a beautiful interface. In half of the cases, the computer address was still determined, a small number of proxy servers used, difficulties in building them into chains, and a rather high price (up to several hundred dollars). Of the shareware programs, SocksChain is very popular. To hide ip, the program uses a proxy. Its advantages include the ability to easily build a chain of proxy servers of any length, but it must be clearly understood that the download speed drops with increasing chain length. The program uses its own list of proxy servers, which can be updated automatically. The program is provided with detailed Russian help. Its disadvantages include the fact that its full version is paid. The free version is limited to hundreds of available proxy servers. They quickly disappear in the SocksChain list, the maximum time of their existence is about a day, usually several hours, so you cannot count on a long time for the chain created by this program.
VPN connection
VPN connection (Virtual Private Network) is a technology that allows you to provide a chain of network connections within the Internet. Despite the fact that information passes through public networks, thanks to the use of cryptographic tools, the degree of its protection is quite high. An example of the implementation of this technology is the Tor program. It uses its network of virtual channels. To hide its ip-address, the program does not transmit information directly from the sender to the recipient, but by random routes through a number of servers. Thanks to this, the address of your computer is completely hidden, so that at any point in the network it is impossible to determine from where and where the data is directly transmitted. In addition to this, the data is encrypted. The entire technology is perfectly described on the program website in Russian. The package installer is small in size, the program has a Russian interface and all the necessary setup instructions. The network and the program are completely free, and its functionality is quite sufficient to achieve anonymity.
