How to browse Internet safely, anonymously and privately
The main aim of writing this blog is to introduce you all to an amazing new website and which extension which offers you a safe, secure and private internet browsing.
Before going deep dive, let’s first understand why do we exactly need all these?
The answer is pretty simple.
We need to browse internet safely because many of us including me uses our personal laptop for OSINT. We don’t have a dedicated device for OSINT investigation. I also agree that we have an alternate option of using Virtual machines either hosted locally or on cloud. But many people can’t afford this and some laptops even face a lot of issues due to low hardware specs, they lag and sometimes makes the work difficult. I always suggest to use VM for OSINT investigation, but if we can have any better option, what’s the bad in using that? Nothing right.
We need to browse internet anonymously because we never want that our victim should ever want to know about us? If he came to know about us, he will also start performing OSINT on us or he will start deleting the traces of his identity. So, in order to tackle this situation, we need to browser internet anonymously. We can use a dedicated browser for that with all sock puppet accounts. But what if we have an option to do OSINT and once we finish the work, we can delete all traces in a single click? Looks cool right. I agree that we can do all this by created a dedicated VM and creating a copy of it again and again for our work. Yeah, that’s also a good option. But right now, we have a better option for free.
We need to browse internet privately so once complete our stuff, everything should be deleted and no trace should be left on our device. Yeah, we can easily do that but what if we have an easy alternative.
Now, let me introduce you all to an amazing website + chrome extension, i.e SquareX: Be Fearless Online.
Many of you may have heard of this earlier too. Let me describe its features, functionality and use case in OSINT.
What exactly is SquareX?
Its a new startup funded by Sequovia Capital and led by Vivek Ramachandran, the man behind who’s know for his amazing contribution in cybersecurity and his first company, Pentester Academy, which is now acquired by INE.
SquareX offers you a feasible, safe, secure and anonymous online browsing by providing you the following -
- A disposable browser
- A disposable file viewer &
- A disposable email
The working is simple, go to https://sqrx.com/ , create a account with emair or use signup with social. Get logged in. Now, you can either use their webapp or chrome extension.
I personally prefer using chrome extension as it provides more features and its easy and fast.
Install their chrome extension via the following link -
Now, as we are done with setup, let’s see how we can launch the browser and file viewer.
Go to https://public.sqrx.com/web/ if you wanted to use the web version or click on the extension icon and you will be seeing something like the below pic -
Now, let’s understand what are the different features and functionality they provides -
- Disposable Browser -
- High-Speed anonymous browsing from any worldwide location -
At the time of writing this blog, they provides a browser from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, UK, Singapore, US East, US West. You can choose any location from these provided depending on your need. The browser provided by them are really very high speed, they also provide an ad-free experience and access to all kinds of websites including pornographic websites and websites which have geographical restrictions. - Safely open suspicious websites without losing privacy -
They offer feasibility to open any website without worry about our privacy as every time we will be having a new browser, also their won’t be any trace of identifying who’s on this side of device who’s browsing that website until you don’t login any account. So, you can browse any website easily by using a sock puppet account. - Dispose the browser at anytime -
It offers you the feasibility to dispose any browser anytime. Assume, we are doing any investigation where we are using some active techniques and your target came to know about this, you can just close the browser in a single click and all traces are deleted now. They will never came to know who exactly are you.
2. Disposable File Viewer -
- Safely view documents from unknown senders -
This is extremely useful when we are doing investigation about any target and we have document as a lead. Now, in many of the cases, their is chance of this document being malicious and intentionally made public. So, we can use this disposable file viewer for opening that document and safely reading that without putting our own device at risk. - Automatic integration with downloaded documents -
Just upload the document from your device and it will automatically open that in a respective software as per the file extension. - Fully private and disposable -
Since every time the session will be changes so its fully private and once we end the session, all data will be deleted.
One thing i miss in this is opening and downloading a document from a link, that would have been amazing and if they can also give an option to select from which software you want to view the file, it would be amazing. let’s see if they comes with any more feature.
3. Disposable Email
- Keep your primary mailbox clean and secure -
when we do OSINT, we explore a lot of new websites and many of them require signup, so we can just use these disposable email and can maintain our privacy. - Temporary, secure and anonymous email address -
Since, these email address have no contact with our details we can freely use these anywhere without being afraid of our identity. - Eliminate spam, unwanted ads, and malicious cyber threats —
This will also be helpful for eliminating ads as we can use these on those websites from where we don’t want to receive any promotional and spam emails. Also, these email can’t be used to gather any information about us, so its of great us.
So, these are the amazing features and functionality SquareX provides and you can think of a lot of other use cases as per your creativity and knowledge.
Note — It’s not a paid promotion, i just liked their product and feels that it can be an amazing tool for maintaining privacy and security while performing OSINT investigations, so that’s why i thought of writing this article.
That’s it for this blog, Tommorrow, we will be learning about internet search engine in next blog.
If i missed something, let me know, so we can cover that topic or point in upcoming blogs.
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