You MUST become Anonymous online before beginning your OSINT search
As you begin your online research for OSINT, you will certainly leave digital traces behind you that can be used to track you back. For example, consider an investigator performing an online search for drug dealers in some location, what if the people who were searching-for discovers this search? What if they could know the source of the search (the organization or the person behind the search), the searcher location and even his/her name? If you think that criminal organizations are not technical savvy in computing, I’m afraid to tell you that you are totally wrong. Terrorists and criminal organizations have specialized teams in IT to gather intelligence online, small criminal organizations with limited budgets outsource such tasks to specialized organizations for a fee.
Knowing how to work online privately is mandatory, as you cannot conduct OSINT searches with your real identity. Describing Online privacy concepts and techniques needs a book on its own and cannot be taught through scattered tutorials available online.
To understand all Digital Privacy concepts in depth and learn how different actors can invade your privacy, we strongly advise you to get this book:
Digital Privacy and Security Using Windows: A practical Guide
Published by Apress 2017.
Book Reviews
- Featured in Digital Forensics Magazine (Issue 33) | Click here to view Book Review
- BookAuthority’s Best Cyber Security Books of All Time. BookAuthority collects and ranks the best books in the world, and it is a great honor to get this kind of recognition.
Book Description
Use this hands-on guide to understand the ever growing and complex world of digital security. Learn how to protect yourself from digital crime, secure your communications, and become anonymous online using sophisticated yet practical tools and techniques.
This book teaches you how to secure your online identity and personal devices, encrypt your digital data and online communications, protect cloud data and Internet of Things (IoT), mitigate social engineering attacks, keep your purchases secret, and conceal your digital footprint. You will understand best practices to harden your operating system and delete digital traces using the most widely used operating system, Windows.
Digital Privacy and Security Using Windows offers a comprehensive list of practical digital privacy tutorials in addition to being a complete repository of free online resources and tools assembled in one place. The book helps you build a robust defense from electronic crime and corporate surveillance. It covers general principles of digital privacy and how to configure and use various security applications to maintain your privacy, such as TOR, VPN, and BitLocker. You will learn to encrypt email communications using Gpg4win and Thunderbird.
What You’ll Learn
- Know the various parties interested in having your private data
- Differentiate between government and corporate surveillance, and the motivations behind each one
- Understand how online tracking works technically
- Protect digital data, secure online communications, and become anonymous online
- Cover and destroy your digital traces using Windows OS
- Secure your data in transit and at rest
- Be aware of cyber security risks and countermeasures
Who This Book Is For
End users, information security professionals, management, infosec students.
Summary of Contents
Here is a brief description of each chapter’s contents:
Chapter 1, “Introduction to the Current Status of Online Privacy”: This chapter
discusses the status of online privacy in today’s world; it talks about different parties
that are interested in having your personal data and the motivation behind that. It
also differentiates between the two types of private information available online
and how each one can be exploited to track users’ online activities. This chapter
also explains how web tracking technologies work to connect users’ web browsing
behavior to their real identity and finally concludes with talking about the different
regulations that exist worldwide for dealing with digital privacy and handling users’
personal data across national borders.
Chapter 2, “Essential Privacy Tips”: This chapter gives you important advice to assure
your privacy when going online. It begins by talking about cybersecurity risks and
then moves on to give suggestions to mitigate those risks. Protecting kids’ privacy
and handling data in the cloud are also covered within this chapter.
Chapter 3, “Windows Security”: In this chapter, we present ways to harden the
Windows OS so it becomes more privacy friendly. Data destruction techniques and
Windows 10 privacy settings are also covered in detail.
Chapter 4, “Online Anonymity”: This chapter teaches you everything you need to
know to become invisible online, including web browsing using TOR, using virtual
private networks and proxies, configuring web browsers to cover your digital
footprint, and using anonymous payments via bitcoins. This chapter is your ultimate
guide for disappearing online.
Chapter 5, “Cryptography and Secure Communication”: This chapter teaches you
how to protect your private data using cryptography, which includes two major
subcategories: encryption and steganography. In the encryption section, we discuss
how to obscure your data at rest and in transit by scrambling it; in the second
section, we briefly cover steganography and give examples on how to use some of its
techniques to hide your private data in plain sight.
Chapter 6, “What’s Next?”: This is the final chapter, where we talk about future trends
and advancements in computing technology and how they will affect your privacy.