home › Adviсe › How hackers hide their locations. How to spoof location in Chrome. Methods by which you can hide your own computer address

How hackers hide their locations. How to spoof location in Chrome. Methods by which you can hide your own computer address

Our company has been contacted more than once by users asking how safe it is. operating system Mac OS? Are there viruses for it? Is it possible to track which resources were visited?

This article is the first in a series Mac OS security, in it we will describe the basics of Internet security, prohibit sites from recording “strange data” on our computer and prevent us from tracking our location.

In order to have fewer questions about why and what is being done, we will start with the theory, but we will not delve too deeply into it, since in some places it can be complex and confusing, so we apologize to experienced administrators and users for the occasional rather crude simplifications.

So: each computer on the network has its own identifier, the so-called IP address. This address contains service information without which our computer will not access the Internet. Roughly speaking, the entire Internet rests on these IP addresses. But, as we all know from school, any information can be used both “positively” and “negatively”.

Your ID will change depending on your location. For example, at work you have one IP, at home another, at the dacha a third, but one thing remains unchanged - using your IP you can determine your location. For example, you went to wikipedia.org. The creators of Wikipedia immediately know from which address you came, which means they know the approximate, or even exact location. Wikipedia is a reliable site that has been proven over the years and has more than one million users, but what to do with the other hundred sites that you visit per day? How do they use this information?

For those who like experiments, we offer laboratory work:
Go to the website 2ip.ru - a service whose main function is to show the IP address and other data.

What you will see:

your ip
provider
operating system
browser
browser version

This information has already minimum about you already the owners of the sites you visit know. What can you do with this information?

Almost the key indicator is the “Where are you from” field. Clicking on it will show us our approximate location.

By the way, if he didn’t show it accurately, as in my case, then you can’t relax, because there is always another way - the human factor. An attacker can go to your provider and for a certain, insignificant amount of money, ask the administrator on duty for information at which address your IP was provided at such and such a time.

Also pay attention to the “History” item on the already favorite website 2ip.ru. By clicking on it, it shows which ips were previously accessed from:

How does he know this? It's all about the so-called cookies. They were invented by the creators of the first browser, Netscape Navigator. Cookies are small files that are stored on our computer. These files contain data about:

What sites did we go to?
What pages on this site were visited?
The site we visited assigns a unique identifier to our computer, for example 8jladwuuuee9283cnenhceiqj8910 and writes it to us in cookies
Other service information

How can this harm us? As stated above, any site that we go to assigns us a unique identifier, and at the same time that it knows our ip and location, we can track almost all the places we visit, provided, of course, that we go to this site .

To make it clearer, I’ll give an example: I like to read articles on Wikipedia. I go to the site from the office to read the meaning of some words, from home to watch the filmography of Bruce Willis, and sometimes I go from the dacha to see the best way to grow hybrid tea roses. Accordingly, Wikipedia knows 3 of my locations and we can assume that:

First this work because I was looking for the meaning of the word "baseDN"
The second one is my home address because I came in at 21:30 and was looking for entertainment material
And the third is my country house, because I was looking for material over the weekend, from a different address, information about roses.

By the way, Wikipedia is almost the only site that does not write cookies to our computer, and the most annoying in this regard turned out to be Google company, which records not only when you visited their website, but also through other resources, such as Google search or a plugin for the Google + social network

The consequences, I think, are not worth describing. Any owner of the site you visit can determine where you are.

So what to do? How to hide your location? First, we will teach our browser not to record cookies and caches. To do this, before surfing the Internet, open the Safari browser and activate the “private browsing” function by clicking in the upper left corner of the Safari->Private browsing screen.

Thanks to this simple button, the browser forcibly cuts off all attempts to write cookies and caches to your computer. But, as always, there is a fly in the ointment - your browsing history, website passwords, and search history will not be saved either. What the program will immediately warn us about when we enable this function

If you did everything correctly, then when you go to the site you will not see the “History” item.

The next step to protect against attackers is to change your real IP. To do this, we need the free Hotspot Shield program. Follow the link, download and install the free version of the program. In the future, if you use it often, the program can be purchased for $29.95, which will make pages load faster.

After installing the program, in order to replace your IP, we just need to launch Hotspot Shield from the program folder on your computer.

She in automatic mode will make the necessary settings and establish a connection with the external server.

PS: To prevent the window from permanently hanging on the screen, you can minimize it by clicking on the yellow button in the upper left corner of the window.

Let's go back to the site and make sure that our IP and provider are now completely different. And our “address” has changed accordingly.

Uncheck all the boxes except “Delete all website data” and click “Reset”

Any electronic device with which we access the Internet has its own IP address. This is a kind of digital indicator, which is characterized by service information regarding our location, the operating system of the device, as well as many other important characteristics about a specific network user. Today we will learn how to change your IP address and hide your real location using macOS and iOS.

The IP address varies depending on location. Using your IP you can determine exactly where you are. Today I propose to do something simple, but interesting. practical task by changing the IP address in order to increase your security and anonymity on the network.

How to determine the IP address

Visit the website 2ip.ru This is a service whose main function is to show the IP address and other important data. What you will see:

Almost the key indicator is the “Where are you from” field. Clicking on it will show us our approximate location.

Also pay attention to the “History” item. By clicking on it, it shows from which IPs you previously accessed it:

How does he know this? The answer is simple.

What are cookies

It's all about the so-called cookies. They were invented by the creators of the first browser, Netscape Navigator. The site we visited assigns a unique identifier to our computer, for example 8jladwuuuee92183cnenhceiqje8910, and writes it to us in cookies. And along with the fact that it knows our IP and location, it is possible to track almost all the places we visit, provided, of course, that we visit this site constantly.

To make it clearer, let me give you an example: I love reading articles on Wikipedia. I go to the site from the office to read the meaning of some words. From home to watch Adam Sandler's filmography. And sometimes I come from the dacha to see how best to grow dahlias. Accordingly, Wikipedia knows 3 of my locations and we can assume that:

The first is this work because I was looking for the meaning of the word "baseDN";
The second is my home address because I came in at 9:30 pm and was looking for entertainment material;
And the third is my country house, because I was looking for information about gerberas over the weekend.

By the way, Wikipedia is almost the only site that does not write cookies to our computer, and the most intrusive company in this regard turned out to be Google, which records not only when you visited their site, but also through other resources on which located, for example, search from google or a plugin for the social network Google +

The consequences, I think, are not worth describing. Any owner of the site you visit can determine where you are.

So what to do? How to hide your location?

How to change IP address

First, we will teach our browser not to record cookies and caches. To do this, before surfing the Internet, open the Safari browser and activate the “private browsing” function by clicking in the upper left corner of the Safari->Private browsing screen.

Thanks to this simple button, the browser forcibly cuts off all attempts to write cookies and caches to your computer. But, as always, there is a fly in the ointment - your browsing history, website passwords, and search history will not be saved either. The program will immediately warn us about this when we enable this function.

If you did everything correctly, then when you go to the 2ip.ru website you will not see the “History” item.

After installing the program, in order to replace your IP, we just need to launch Hotspot Shield from the program folder on your computer.

It will automatically make the necessary settings and establish a connection with an external server.

To prevent the window from constantly hanging on the screen, you can minimize it by clicking on the yellow button in the upper left corner of the window.

Let's go back to the site and make sure that our IP and provider are now completely different. And accordingly, our “address” has changed.

Uncheck all the boxes except “Delete all website data” and click “Reset”

Thanks to the manipulations described above, we have made it much more difficult for attackers to try to find our location, and we have also learned how to replace our IP and enable private access mode in Safari so that the browser does not record files that could harm us.

Finally, I would like to say that these are the basic points for ensuring security, because... attackers can gain access to your data by intercepting mail, data, web page data or documents sent/downloaded from the Internet. To do this, you will need to understand the difference in encryption, SSL, TLS, study the principle of encrypted disks, the operation of PGP Mail and PGP disk, digital signature letters.

Last updated by at September 22, 2018.

You can disguise your real geolocation using the Hola Fake GPS location application. After the first
After launch, you will have to spend a few minutes to make the necessary settings. But in the future you will be able to change coordinates almost instantly in a simple and convenient interface.

After installing Hola Fake GPS location, you must give the program permission to change the geoposition. To do this, first click in the GO application, and then Settings - the “For Developers” section will open. Then find the option “Select apps for fake locations” and use it to select Hola Fake GPS location.

When you make the above settings, the application will be ready to use. To use it to change the coordinates for all other programs, just select a false location on the map and press the GO button. You can choose any locations around the world. To disable coordinate substitution, you need to click on STOP.

False location transmission works in background. By enabling Hola Fake GPS location, you will be able to share your coordinates as usual. in social networks and take new pictures in other programs. But now other users will see not your actual location and not the places where you took the photo, but the selected coordinates.

You can also control the operation of Hola Fake GPS location using a special widget that appears on the notification panel after installing the program.

If you decide to use a false geolocation to unblock services that do not work in your country, know that you will most likely not succeed. Suitable for this purpose.

After turning off Hola, other applications may still see dummy coordinates. In such cases, simply restart the GPS module.

The Hola Fake GPS location application is available with a paid subscription or completely free. But in the second case, the program will use the processing power of your device while it is idle and a little traffic.

How to change location on iOS

Unfortunately, in iOS it is not possible to spoof your location using fake GPS data. The high degree of closedness of the system does not allow installing programs from sources other than the official application store App Store, in which there is no place for such tools. Apple moderators check all applications and, if there are functions that violate the rules, refuse to publish to developers.

The only chance to change the location on your iPhone or iPad is to jailbreak it and use one of several tweaks available in Cydia like LocationHandle or LocationFaker. However, this option is only available to users with iOS 10.2 or later. earlier versions, which can be jailbroken.

Almost every Internet user sooner or later faces the problem of how to hide your IP? In order to understand how to do this, first let’s define what it is and why it is necessary.

What is my ip?

Everyone knows that every computer on the Internet has an address. Many people even know that it can be either static, i.e. constant, or dynamic (changing with each connection). Why is this information needed?

First of all, you need to know it when playing some online games. Not all of them have their own server, therefore, knowing each other’s addresses, participants can contact each other directly. Knowing your address makes it possible to set up protection for various online services. Many online banking programs and payment systems make it possible to limit actions in your account with a “white” list of addresses. A number of programs, especially communication ones, use such addresses for direct transmission of correspondence to the addressee, for their manual settings you need to have this information.

You can easily find out the IP address. There are a number of special services running directly on the network that will almost instantly determine the location of your computer and the value of its address. Having figured out what an IP address is, let's talk about why it needs to be hidden. There may be several reasons for this.

Reasons for hiding your address

1. This is the desire to access a number of sites anonymously, so that they do not find out (by using the IP address, anyone can easily obtain a number of information about the computer and its owner, for example, information about what operating system and browser is installed, city and country connection to the network, through which provider, etc.).

2. Strengthen the protection of your computer on the network (for a good hacker it’s easy to steal the IP address important information, such as access passwords personal accounts sites and e-wallets used, view correspondence and a whole range of other information located on the computer).

3. Urgently download a necessary or simply interesting file, but the place where it is stored informs you that you have connected to it too many times and therefore connection is only possible later, after some time, and there is no desire to wait.

4. The moderator on the desired forum has blocked access from your address for violating certain rules and now there is no access to posting at all. Here you can hide your computer address and simply register again on the forum. And now you communicate without breaking the rules, and if you did, it’s easy to change them again.

How to hide a computer's IP address?

When a computer browser loads any web resource, it sends its address to the web server, its custodian, so that it knows who to send the information to in response. Therefore, in order to hide your address, your computer cannot be connected to the resource directly. How to hide your IP, what is needed for this? For this purpose you need a computer

connect through another intermediary computer, by connecting to which we force it to connect to the website we are interested in. Thanks to this, the web server will determine that the connection was made not from the address assigned to your computer, but from the one to which it connected. In this way, the real address of the computer is hidden. Having understood its essence, we can move on to methods that allow us to do this.

Methods by which you can hide your own computer address

Let's figure out how to hide your IP? To do this, you can use your browser settings or special programs. Accordingly, there are 4 methods by which you can hide your address:

2. Use online services.

3. Using a special program.

4. VPN connection.

Manually setting up browsers

The setup is done in three steps:

1. Find sites with lists of proxy servers.

2. Enter the address into the browser settings.

3. Check the server for functionality.

By typing the corresponding query in a search engine, we get a fairly large list of answering sites. By selecting and opening any, we will see a list with such servers. To filter out the “dead” ones, there is usually a “Check” button. But this does not guarantee their performance; later they need to be checked manually. The results of the check are summarized in a table, so you will get working proxies. Then they need to be set as a proxy server in the browser. This setting occurs differently in different browsers. Let's consider the standard browser Internet Explorer. As an example, we use the address 193.15.24.11:80. Open Internet Explorer, in the top menu in the “Tools” item, select the “Internet Options” tab. In the next window, on the “Connections” tab, select your Internet connection and click the settings button. In the new window that opens, check the box next to the item about using a proxy server to connect. After this, the “Address” and “Port” fields become available; we fill them with the values 193.15.24.11 and 80, respectively. Clicking the “Ok” button twice completes the proxy server setup. To check the functionality, go to the site for determining the IP address and location. If the page failed to load, then the proxy you are using is not working and you need to select the next one in the list; if the page displays a map showing your current location, it means you made a mistake somewhere or the server is also not working, otherwise everything works correctly .

Special Internet services

How to hide your ip with their help? Their use is very simple. Load a special website, enter the address of the site you are interested in in the appropriate field of the form and work. Now the address of the anonymizer site is recorded in specialized site files instead of the real address of your computer. By following links to pages you are interested in, you are taken to another page again using an anonymizer site. This method, despite its simplicity, has a number of disadvantages. Many of the necessary sites are paid. There are, of course, free ones, but in this case, when displaying pages, they insert

a number of advertising blocks with different sizes and frequency of occurrence. The addresses of these servers are well known and are blacklisted by services that divide visitors by their place of residence or keep records of detailed information about visitors. Such sites are not available for the anonymizer site. In addition, the anonymizer site usually announces itself that it is an anonymizer. That is, the site cannot identify you. And the fact that you use an anonymizer is elementary. Therefore, when you need to introduce yourself as a foreigner, these sites cannot be used. There are many examples of such sites. They block the installation of cookies and the execution of Java scripts. No money required, virtually no advertising. The owners of these sites have developed specialized panels that allow you to use services without going directly to the sites.

Using special programs

If you are not satisfied with using anonymizers to hide your address, you will have to search for proxy servers manually, as described above. How to hide your computer's IP address more effectively? This is exactly what special people do

programs. There are quite a lot of them, and it is almost impossible to describe everything. Most of them have weak functionality hidden behind a beautiful interface. In half of the cases, the computer address was still determined, a small number of proxy servers used, difficulties in building them into chains, and a fairly high price (up to several hundred dollars). From conditionally free programs SocksChain is very popular. To hide the IP, the program uses a proxy. Its advantages include the ability to easily build a chain of proxy servers of any length, but you need to clearly understand that the download speed drops with increasing chain length. The program uses its own list of proxy servers, which can be updated automatically. The program is supplied with detailed Russian help. Its disadvantages include the fact that its full version is paid. IN free version The number of available proxy servers is limited to hundreds. They quickly disappear in the SocksChain list, the maximum time of their existence is about a day, usually several hours, so you cannot count on long-term operation of the chain created by this program.

VPN connection

VPN connection (Virtual Private Network) is a technology that allows you to provide a chain network connections within the Internet. Despite the fact that information passes through public networks, thanks to the use of cryptography, the degree of its protection is quite high. An example of the implementation of this technology is the Tor program. It uses its network of virtual channels. To hide your ip address, the program does not transmit information directly from the sender to the recipient, but via random routes through a number of servers. Thanks to this, the address of your computer is completely hidden, so that at any point on the network it is impossible to determine where the data is coming from and where it is directly transmitted. In addition to this, the data is encrypted. The entire technology is perfectly described on the program’s website in Russian. The package installer is small in size, the program has a Russian interface and all the necessary setup instructions. The network and the program are completely free, and its functionality is quite sufficient to achieve anonymity.

A situation may arise when you need to hide your real location, or, for example, indicate a false one. You don’t want your friends or family to know where you are. You may be asked to share coordinates via iMessage or be tracked using the Find My Friends app. On iPhone and iPad, it is possible to spoof your location: iOS allows you to send the geolocation data of a device that is located on the other side of the city or even the country.

So, now we are in a nightclub, but we want to feel like we are at home for everyone. For this trick you will need another gadget from Apple, under iOS control 8 or higher, connected to the same account.