There is a growing need for anonymity online for a variety of reasons. Some are practical in that increasingly the major risk of theft for many of us is in fact online. Identity thieves, hackers and electronic criminals are increasingly using the internet to steal both our property and our identity, in fact usually both.

But if you use the internet it’s difficult, the problem is largely due to the protocol we all use to surf the internet – HTTP. The Hyper Text Transfer protocol is of course instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever typed in a web site into their browser. It’s a fast, efficient protocol which has server the web well, however it has one major problem it transmits everything in clear text. So this is obviously a huge problem for any type of Anonymous Surfing. The secret is of course that you need to use encryption to have any hope of keeping your data private.

As such the sale of VPNs, secure shells and private proxies are growing all the time, as slowly people realise how vulnerable their data is in fact online. There are of course others who simply think that they can direct all their data through some Mickey Mouse proxy they found online. Unfortunately most of them fail to realise that the majority of the time these are actually controlled by the hackers themselves. These unfortunates are actually directing all their traffic straight to the bad guys.