Introduction to Proxy sites

Feb 4

Posted by Shailabh

Basic idea about how proxy works!

Hey guys, today I will share about Proxy sites, what it is and its uses. Proxy acts as the intermediate between the hacker’s system and web server. In common proxy is an application or computer system which covers your IP address to seek the information from the web server. An attacker (attacker) connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a web page, or other resource available from a different server. The proxy server evaluates the request according to its filtering rules. It may filter by IP address or by a protocol. That is, it will change your IP address or it will convert your request into a protocol allowing you to access the content of that sever. Here is the scenario of one of my uncle who works in a pharma company as a manager where he has a free access to internet but he is not allowed to have access with  social networking sites! He told me that the sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are not allowed to access so I came up with this…! I asked him to log into any proxy site and enter into Facebook or any other site by typing the url in the proxy site. This encodes the url and the page, not allowing the server to identify your computer. Your computer IP would have been changed when we use proxy. This was just a scenario of  an employ but an attacker can use this for many purposes. He can enter into a corporate firewalls just by imitating the IP address own the victim who is already inside the firewall network. That is, a hacker if wants to hack a web service then he will connect with a PC which is already in connect with the web service! A proxy server may optionally alter the attacker’s request or the server’s response, and sometimes it may serve the request without contacting the specified server. In this case, it ‘caches’ responses from the remote server, and returns subsequent requests for the same content directly. I wanted to hack into my college’s website so if I had to do so then I had to connect to my principal’s computer which is already a part of the network since principal has a to gain access into the college website’s account and use his computer’s IP as proxy and enter to the website’s login page. Uses:

• It can be used to be an anonymous user, keeping your self hidden.
• Web proxies are commonly used to cache web pages from a web server.
• To have an access to networking sites or content, e.g. to block undesired sites.
• To access sites prohibited sites by your Internet Service Provider.
• To provide company employee Internet usage reporting.
• To bypass security / parental controls of a PC.
• To avoid Internet filtering to access content, e.g. to access social networking sites in colleges and schools.
• To scan transmitted content for malware before delivery.
• To hack into any computer.
• To allow a web site to make web requests to externally hosted resources when cross-domain restrictions prohibit the web site from linking directly to the outside domains.
• To speed up access to resources (using caching).

This gave you a basic notion about the proxy sites and proxy sever. In my upcoming posts i will talk about making a proxy site and hacking in an internal server using proxy! Please comment and share if you find this post helpful…