How to Hide IP Using Tor and Socks Proxy

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Most users faced with regional bans of web resources by providers and authority. In most cases, you can bypass this restrictions using socks proxy or Tor software for spoofing your real IP-address.

What is Tor?

Tor (The onion router) - free open source software for establishing anonymous and safe connection through virtual network with a number of intermediate nodes. Tor is a very effective tool for bypassing provider’s access restrictions to some web resources and services (for example web pages and torrents) and hiding your real IP-address from intruders.

Installation and configuring Tor is a simple task even for beginners. Just download Tor package, install it on your PC and launch installed browser. Tor connection automatically starts when you launch Tor-browser. You needn’t to perform any configuration process – just use installed browser for anonymous web surfing.

You can find the detailed information about Tor on the project’s official web site. There you can read about how it works, and how you can configure it. However, let’s review advantages and disadvantages of this software.

Advantages:

  • It’s free and you can review it’s sources, so you can assure, that there is no backdoors or some malicious code;

  • You can get a reliable anonymous access to web resources by using random intermediate and exit nodes that change about once in 10 minutes;

  • Easy installation and configuration.

Disadvantages:

  • Low performance;

  • Websites can determine that you use Tor and block access for you. You can’t hide Tor from this websites using it’s regular tools;

  • Tor was created with the support of the U.S. Navy and used by government authorities. Thus, you can’t be sure that the exit nodes of Tor network don’t belong to authorities, so there is a probability that your web activity can be monitored by these organizations;

  • Tor doesn’t support UDP, so you can’t securely use VoIP and torrents.

Thus, Tor can’t be used alone as effective and safe tool for anonymous access to web resources. I’d recommend to use SOCKS5 proxy (preferably with VPN), which doesn’t have the above disadvantages.

And what about the combination of socks proxy and Tor?

You can use such combination, but it doesn’t provide you some special advantages. You can forward your traffic through socks proxy on the enter node to hide the fact of using Tor from your provider, but it has no practical value. It’s preferable to use VPN + socks proxy to hide your activity and get real safe access, because you can trust your exit node.

Unfortunately, the current version of Tor for Windows doesn’t allow users to configure socks-proxy after exit node of Tor network to hide the fact of using Tor from the target web resources, so this instrument can be ineffective for getting access to some web resources.

Summary

Tor is recognized as high effective tool for anonymous access, but there are some doubts about the reliability of the output nodes. Tor isn’t effective when used with socks proxy and it is recommended to use socks5 proxy with VPN for real safe access. In addition, Tor has a poor performance and cuts the bandwidth of your network channel. You can find the detailed information about installing and configuring VPN and socks proxy in the help section of our website.