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To see what hops a packet might make between we and our destination, we can see the traceroute command in our Kali Linux treminal as following:Īs we can see in the screenshot is 10 hops across the internet from us.
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This is one way websites can tell who we are when arrive and log us in automatically, and it's also how someone can track where we have been on the internet. For general internet surfing each hop is a router the packets passes through to get to its destination, but usually any packet will find its way to the destination in fewer then 15 hops.Īs the packet traverses the internet, anyone intercepting the packet can see who sent it, Where it has been, and it's going. Each packet hops through multiple internet routers until it finds its destination and then hops back to the sender. In this way, the packet knows where it is going and where to return the response. When we send a data packet across the internet, it contains the IP address of the source and destination for the data. Let's start by taking a look at how IP address give us away on the internet. Although there are many more sophisticated methods that are far more time and resource intensive, these are the ones we try to prevent in this post. Second, Google and other email services will read our email, looking for keywords to more efficiently serve the ads. Data send from our machine is generally tagged with our IP address, making our activities easy to track. Indeed such a discussion could take up an entire book on it's own.įirst, our IP address identifies us as we traverse the internet. We won't go into all tracking methods, or into too much details about only one method, as that would be beyond the scope of this post. Let's start, finally we discuss at a high level some of the ways our activity on the internet are tracked. However we can use all methods together, this will make the tracker's job almost impossible.
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No one method is sure to keep our activities safe from prying eyes and given enough time and resources, anything can be tracked. In this detailed post we look how we can navigate the World Wide Web anonymously (or as close as we can get) and safely using four methods:
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