I have seen a few posts in the past with people asking about various methods they can incorporate with regard to hiding their identity on the web, faking email, masking their IP address, probing a server, etc. The word hacker usually conjures up images of a computer wizard as being a geeky looking person with thick horn-rimmed glasses or one with freakish colored hair and multiple body piercings. You cannot tell the difference in who is a hacker and who is not if you were to walk down the street and look at people. They come in all different shapes and sizes and can be of either sex.
A true hacker is a person who contributes usually to open-source software(Linux, YaBB, etc.) fixing bugs and coming up with "hacks," or improvements to add to a program. True hackers have received a bad rap from the so-called Blackhat Society, some are crackers, as they are sometimes known as. Crackers are ones who reverse-engineer software to get around security mechanisms which then allows them to access programs, programs that are normally paid for by the general public. Most cracks are made to defeat "trial periods," or serial number authentication. You like the latest Dreamweaver release from Macromedia? You can download it from their website and then get the crack which defeats the trial period. Once the trial period is removed, you now have a full version copy of one of the best HTML editors on the market which normally retails for a couple hundred dollars. There are other crack uses such as password cracking too. (I am in no way condoning piracy or theft of software which you have not paid for)
My intention in this coming series of posts is to help educate some of you how to defend and anonymize yourselves while on the web. Anonymity is going to be stressed the most. Some of the topics I will go over in detail are: Email, and how to go about tracing email you receive from people, fake email(spoofing), trojans and virii, browsing anonymously, finding out what software is running on a server(s), and how to help make your true identity invisible on the web. I will describe both sides of the coin as best that I can. From your perspective and also from the bad guy and what they can do to you.
Many people are given incorrect information on the above topics at times, and I felt that these things should be gone over so that you do not have any misconceptions on what is false and what is true. How many times do you read or hear about the latest virus which when only "looked" at will delete all of your files on your computer? If I only had a nickel......
Just as a reference, I am fairly well accustomed to all MS Windows applications, variations of UNIX such as Solaris, HP-UX, Linux Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE. With the majority of these OS's, I work on them everyday at my job. Being that Windows is the majority shareholder in the desktop market, I will cover Windows heavily and may point to some Linux as an alternative, as there are many powerful tools that Linux systems employ which Windows does not.
Next up, email....