Your Free Virus Removal

I love the internet, I love surfing to various parts of it, viewing all sorts of information and using that information to help myself, be it educationally, financially, or spiritually. However, there comes a time in every internet pioneer’s life when they want to be watched a little less, when they yearn to carry out their activities in secrecy because they are afraid that their activities will be used against them. That is where this Anonymizer comes in. This program takes all of your internet traffic and passes it through what is referred to as a proxy. A proxy is a specialized computer whose sole task it is to take your web traffic, make a note of who is requesting the page, and sanitize your IP address and hostname from the headers. I will show you below what this all looks like at the conclusion of the article. This program is free to try, it will protect you shopping online, from “phishing” and “pharming”, and it will protect you wirelessly. First of all, some definition, a phishing attack is where the attacker requests the user tell them things eg. “Hi, this is Mark, from Bank of Whatever, I need to have you read your credit card number off to me”… that is an all too common phishing attack, a pharming attack is where a program is installed on a computer to subvert the user into thinking they are doing one task while actually they are doing another, like shopping online, the attacker will use the information entered for “fun and profit”.

Anonymizer comes in three flavors, there is little difference between them, however, the prices start at $19.99 for a year and go up from there. If you are very security conscious (like me), you will be happy to know they offer a more comprehensive package called Anonymizer Total Net Shield, this is a firewall, spam and spyware blocker, and the Anonymizer package all integrated into one box.

Before I forget, the software comes with a week’s worth of free subscription.

To configure Anonymizer, you first start the program and it will direct your browsers and e-mail to use it as what is referred to as a proxy, this will then forward your traffic to the destination. It is very effective and does work well. Now, as I am a computer guy and speed is everything to me, so I have to warn you that if you proxy your internet/e-mail stuff, it will slow down, it is not your service provider’s fault, nor is it your computer’s, it is the overhead cause by the anonymizing software. It takes about a tenth of a second to process each packet and when you are doing a lot of things online or going to content rich sites, things do unfortunately slow down.

Now as promised, here is a break down of what happens. Hope you like it.

1. Sender sends information, Proxy receives, strips packets of sender’s IP address and routing information, proxy makes cryptic reference internally about where sender is.
2. Proxy forwards traffic to remote host using the proxy’s external IP address.
3. Remote hosts responds, sending information to proxy server, NOT USER!
4. Proxy server recalls cryptic reference and forwards traffic back to originating computer, process then cycles back to A.

Anonymizer isn’t a free virus removal tool but it could keep you safe from people spying your IP! What do you think? Share your comments below!