Technologies: Once Designed To Keep You Safe

While in college we used to access Internet via college network whose firewall used to stop us from accessing sites like Orkut, Facebook, Youtube, Ishare etc. It used to disallow downloads via any site, even updates via anti-virus programs were restricted. This was really very irritating since we used to pay compulsory 1000 bucks extra with college fees for Internet facility. Since firewall rules were updated everyday situation used to become worse since sometimes it even used to ban some important sites, even CE not fell to an exception. To solve this we have to submit an extra application to college to allow access to those site even that was tedious process since a student was called several times unnecessarily for verification. So students used to find out ways to dodge firewall security and since we were students of Computer discipline it hardly took us any time to do that. Anonymizers, proxy servers, sock chain proxies were highly used by students to bypass firewall security, i know this scenario is quite common in all organizations who use firewall. By the way every student has his own method to bypass but one day while i was in college dorm with friends they came out with topic using a hacking software which tunnels traffic via another protocol. When the topic came up i was highly reluctant to accept tunneling softwares are hacking tools.

Then they said the other tools that we use like Proxies, Sock Chains and Anonymizers are also hacking tools. I was highly reluctant to their these words but i failed to convince them that i am right. I know the fact that all those things which we used to bypass firewall security are generally used by criminal hacker for hacking purposes but still i was reluctant. I still not agree they are just hacking tools because i know when they were built first they were built to provide security and not destruction. Most of you don’t even know why these tools were built for but they know for what they are used for. So now i want to tell you what was the real purpose of those tools when they were built so that you can understand those tools were not built for hackers but for you. Lets start with Anonymizers.

The day when use of web based scripts and Active X controls came up on Internet, it became easier for criminal minds to execute code on every user’s computer who visit their site. Since this problem was new there were no proper security suits to check this type of malicious activity. One day a person came across this problem and thought to provide complete solution to this problem and first Anonymizer came into existence in year 1997. The person who found solution to this problem was Lance Cotterll, the inventor of Anonymizers. Anonymizers act as dummy system for your system and act as a complete system for external sites. This capability of Anonymizer provided the user with total anonymity against any site and also digested all malicious scripts and Active X codes run by malicious sites. Wasn’t that useful, the person for whom it was created ignored its functionality and crackers thought complete anonymity that means full protection against detection. Like this a useful tool turned into hacking tool.

Even proxy softwares were designed to keep your IP address safe from sites that monitors IP addresses of their visitors and many times you might not want your IP to be disclosed. Even that tool wasn’t got used by people for whom it was intended and people with intellectual minds found it useful for keeping them-self safe after hacking. Soon hackers found way to sniff traffic on shared network. And not only hackers but also Network Administrators were able to monitor your traffic and actually they shared an extra advantage over hackers because they were even able to capture and interpret data you are sending and receiving from remote system without extra effort. That was dangerous because your e-mails, IRC conversations and even passwords can be accessed via third person without your knowledge. Tunneling softwares solved this problem by tunneling one protocol inside another so that if anyone captures the data, it should remain of no use to him than some random characters and again only hackers found it useful because for the people whom privacy was big thing never bothered to have a look on the tool.

Most of the people might not be knowing that even VPN softwares are capable of bypassing firewalls and network restrictions easily and can provide protection against network monitoring. Even that can keep you safe while on shared network if you know how to configure it. So like this the tools and technologies which were intended for something became useful for something else. I still don’t know why developers and hackers community never put light on real use of this tools and changing their identity to that for which they were built for and thus met to a dreadful end getting named as hacking tools Technologies, Once Designed To Keep You Safe.