Proxychains
Warning: This tutorial can be used for illegal purposes. My intent is to educate and teach how to use these things legally. I'm not responsible for you. Don't be stupid.
Hey guys. In this post we'll look at how to use a common tool to hide our real IP address. For this tutorial you'll need a Linux distro or a Mac. You could probably install proxychains on windows. But using trying to be anonymous on windows is like trying to stop a waterfall with a cork. The next thing you'll need is proxychains (obviously). The Kali Linux repositories should have it. Otherwise you can get it on github: hxxps://github.com/haad/proxychains. Go ahead and install it on whatever system you're on.
Step 1
Get Proxies
The first thing we do is find some SOCKS proxies. SOCKS is a protocol designed for forwarding network packets from a client to a server. Which makes it great for proxies. If you don't know, proxies are used to act as a middleman for communication over the internet or other networks. You could also use the TOR network for this, but it tends to be slow. Which is a no-go for things like port scanning. Also, TOR nodes are commonly blacklisted. For our purposes, we'll use the SOCKS proxy to hide our IP address. Since our middleman is sending the packets to the destination for us, the destination thinks the traffic is originating from the proxy. SOCKS proxies are easy enough to find. Good ones are harder to find. You can go and get any old proxy, but it may or may not be good for your needs. There are some things to take into account when choosing proxies depending on what exactly you're using it for.
- Proxy's Geographic Location
- Your Geographic Location
- Speed
- Is the proxy a honeypot?
These things are important. You need to determine for yourself where you want the traffic to appear to come from. This is arbitrary and depends on your situation. The speed also matters. For things like port scanning, you'll want a faster connection. A far as your proxy being a honeypot or not, there's not a great way to tell. Unless you get into the proxy and search around the system you can't really know for sure if it's a honeypot. This is especially true for free proxies. You want to avoid using honeypots if possible, but it may only matter so much. Proxychains lets you use several proxies chained together. Since we're going to use multiple proxies at once, the proxies won't be able to see the end destination and source. The first proxy will be able to see your real IP, and the last proxy will be able to see your destination IP. I usually use this site for my proxies, but you can use whatever you want. Pick at least three or so.
Step 2
Configure Proxychains
Now we set up proxychains. In Linux you need to open /etc/proxychains.conf in the text editor of your choice. For Mac, sorry I have no idea where the configuration file is and you'll have to find it. In the config file you'll see some of the options for how your proxies are chained. There are three settings: dynamic, strict, and random. Dynamic is most likely the one you'll want to use. It uses all the proxies in the list in order, and skips "dead" proxies. Random chain is similar, but it picks however many random proxies you specify and doesn't skip dead proxies. Strict just goes down the list using all the proxies and doesn't skip any. To pick an option just uncomment the line with the setting name and comment out the setting it had before. An example config file is below.
Proxychains config
You can see the config is set to use random chain (because the "random_chain" part doesn't have a "#" before it). Once you've chosen a setting, now we add the proxies. Scroll to the bottom of the config file. It should already have one entry for the proxies (socks4 127.0.0.1 9050). This is the default setting to use TOR. You'll need to comment out that setting by putting a "#" directly to the before the TOR line. It'll look like this:
Now below add your proxies. The syntax is as follows:
You may notice there are two spaces between the proxy type, IP, and port. This is just how proxychains does it and I usually do the same. I've also used tabs, so just experiment with what does/doesn't work for you. We're done with the config file for the moment. Save, exit, and pull up your command line interface
Step 3
Using Proxychains
Using proxychains is the easiest part. Just put "proxychains" before any other command. For example:
You should see some output from proxychains and the tool you're using.
Closing Notes
There are a few things to remember when using proxychains. First of all, although it can proxy DNS requests I wouldn't mess with that if I didn't have to. For nmap or netcat you can use the -n option to tell them to not resolve DNS names. Secondly, you can use proxychains with your browser. I wouldn't recommend that unless you have to. There are plenty of things that can make your browser leak your IP. Plugins, Javascript, etc. Just don't do it unless you have to. Last but not least, this tutorial can be used for illegal purposes. My intent is to educate and teach how to use these things legally.
- W32.DisTrack ;)
Warning: This tutorial can be used for illegal purposes. My intent is to educate and teach how to use these things legally. I'm not responsible for you. Don't be stupid.
Hey guys. In this post we'll look at how to use a common tool to hide our real IP address. For this tutorial you'll need a Linux distro or a Mac. You could probably install proxychains on windows. But using trying to be anonymous on windows is like trying to stop a waterfall with a cork. The next thing you'll need is proxychains (obviously). The Kali Linux repositories should have it. Otherwise you can get it on github: hxxps://github.com/haad/proxychains. Go ahead and install it on whatever system you're on.
Step 1
Get Proxies
The first thing we do is find some SOCKS proxies. SOCKS is a protocol designed for forwarding network packets from a client to a server. Which makes it great for proxies. If you don't know, proxies are used to act as a middleman for communication over the internet or other networks. You could also use the TOR network for this, but it tends to be slow. Which is a no-go for things like port scanning. Also, TOR nodes are commonly blacklisted. For our purposes, we'll use the SOCKS proxy to hide our IP address. Since our middleman is sending the packets to the destination for us, the destination thinks the traffic is originating from the proxy. SOCKS proxies are easy enough to find. Good ones are harder to find. You can go and get any old proxy, but it may or may not be good for your needs. There are some things to take into account when choosing proxies depending on what exactly you're using it for.
- Proxy's Geographic Location
- Your Geographic Location
- Speed
- Is the proxy a honeypot?
These things are important. You need to determine for yourself where you want the traffic to appear to come from. This is arbitrary and depends on your situation. The speed also matters. For things like port scanning, you'll want a faster connection. A far as your proxy being a honeypot or not, there's not a great way to tell. Unless you get into the proxy and search around the system you can't really know for sure if it's a honeypot. This is especially true for free proxies. You want to avoid using honeypots if possible, but it may only matter so much. Proxychains lets you use several proxies chained together. Since we're going to use multiple proxies at once, the proxies won't be able to see the end destination and source. The first proxy will be able to see your real IP, and the last proxy will be able to see your destination IP. I usually use this site for my proxies, but you can use whatever you want. Pick at least three or so.
Step 2
Configure Proxychains
Now we set up proxychains. In Linux you need to open /etc/proxychains.conf in the text editor of your choice. For Mac, sorry I have no idea where the configuration file is and you'll have to find it. In the config file you'll see some of the options for how your proxies are chained. There are three settings: dynamic, strict, and random. Dynamic is most likely the one you'll want to use. It uses all the proxies in the list in order, and skips "dead" proxies. Random chain is similar, but it picks however many random proxies you specify and doesn't skip dead proxies. Strict just goes down the list using all the proxies and doesn't skip any. To pick an option just uncomment the line with the setting name and comment out the setting it had before. An example config file is below.
Proxychains config
You can see the config is set to use random chain (because the "random_chain" part doesn't have a "#" before it). Once you've chosen a setting, now we add the proxies. Scroll to the bottom of the config file. It should already have one entry for the proxies (socks4 127.0.0.1 9050). This is the default setting to use TOR. You'll need to comment out that setting by putting a "#" directly to the before the TOR line. It'll look like this:
Code
#socks4 127.0.0.1 9050Code
proxytype proxyip proxyportStep 3
Using Proxychains
Using proxychains is the easiest part. Just put "proxychains" before any other command. For example:
Code
proxychains nmap 192.168.1.1Closing Notes
There are a few things to remember when using proxychains. First of all, although it can proxy DNS requests I wouldn't mess with that if I didn't have to. For nmap or netcat you can use the -n option to tell them to not resolve DNS names. Secondly, you can use proxychains with your browser. I wouldn't recommend that unless you have to. There are plenty of things that can make your browser leak your IP. Plugins, Javascript, etc. Just don't do it unless you have to. Last but not least, this tutorial can be used for illegal purposes. My intent is to educate and teach how to use these things legally.
- W32.DisTrack ;)
![[Image: Cg4ZWf2.png]](https://i.imgur.com/Cg4ZWf2.png)
