Proxy servers have been in the news as of late, both as a result of this putative election and a new legal case in which Microsoft is suing purveyors of advertising fraud. I thought it would take you through what proxies are, how they can be used for both good and bad, and what all the fuss is about. First, here’s a little background. When you bring up your Internet browser, you are asked how you would like it to connect to the Internet. The majority of us have home PCs do not use any proxy, and go out to the raw Web with no fuss or bother. But enterprises that are looking to cut back on their bandwidth utilization, improve security and performance, and also have control over what their customers see use them all the time.
Each browser checks and sees if the Web page that is being Asked is on the proxy’s cache, or memory, and in that case, it saves a couple of milliseconds or more by grabbing the webpage directly, without needing to traverse the Internet in any respect. So far as the browsing user is concerned, all this happens without any notification, aside from the pages appear to load faster on their PCs. About the only configuration option is the IP address of the host, which can be placed within the browser options or network settings. And proxies are available for more than just Web protocols, though that is their most popular use case.
That is the great side of proxies. Proxies are supposed to be for internal customers of a venture, but when a hacker can learn the IP address of inner private proxies, they can get access to lots of community resources. This is a common MO for the hacker Adrian Limo, amongst others, and you still find corporations that have not secured their proxies down with the suitable security. Additionally it is possible for proxies to run on a user’s PC without their knowledge, which is a frequent way bonnets are made.
When the Iranian government wanted to block Internet access, several Personal individuals from all over the world took it upon themselves to install the open source proxy Squid and other tools in their networks to get around these blocks. Then they publicized through Twitter that the IP address Of the Squid PCs so that anybody could connect to the Internet, rather than be blocked. Naturally, since the government learns of those speeches, they add them to their block list, so another cat and mouse game ensues.