Hiding Footprints on the Internet—An Undocumented Approach to Maintaining Anonymity on the Web

Abstract

Maintaining anonymity on the Internet is a daunting issue when carrying out offensive activities on the target's networks. This paper examines the subject of anonymity on the Internet and explores an undocumented technique (used only by hackers world wide) that uses a multiple proxy server chain to mislead audit trails across the net taking advantage of the fact that if one of the proxy servers didn't log the trail, it would be impossible to get to the intruder. The paper by no means is a tutorial on actually wiping out fingerprints on the Internet and may not be used as such. The motivation for the paper is purely technical content and a need to document such techniques as are used by the underground community the world over. The technique described has been tried out as a test case at the Military College of Telecommunication Engineering, Mhow purely for academic purposes.