InfoSec for TBP Readers – Part 1

Guest Post by aka.attrition

Privacy and security are not easy and especially not for those of us who are not very computer literate. Coming from an information technology (IT) background with special interest in information security (infosec) I decided to write an article for the layman (don’t give me no uphill about politically correct words!) to help you increase your security and protect your privacy a little more.  This is a small contribution to this website where I spend far too much time reading the articles and especially the major commentators – you know who you are. Thanks Jim and the heavy hitters.

The full article is broken down into 3 parts and each part has several sections;

Part 1

• The one thing you need to do with your browser
• Ad-blockers and anti-trackers
• Internet search

Part 2

• Email
• DNS servers
• Virtual Private Networks – VPN

Part 3 (if there is interest)

• Windows 10/11 – the boss tracker and what you can do about it.

I realize that some of these topics can be a hard for the non-IT / computer oriented person and I write this article with those end-users in mind, not an IT professional audience. There are very many options, settings, and tools one can use but in this article I’m going to restrict it to just a few of the biggest-bang-for-your-buck changes, those things we should all be able to implement without too much IT knowledge. After all, we have day jobs.

The One Thing You Need To Do with Your Browser

There are many browsers out there and I cannot cover them all so will focus on just Firefox which also has probably the largest number of add-ons available. I have tried most browsers (except Chrome which I won’t touch as it is a Google browser and who knows what information is being leaked through back channels in there). I find that Firefox gives me the best balance of features / functionality and security / privacy options. The settings I use in Firefox are applicable to any browser and they all should have these options but you will have to look around for them, usually under “settings” … duh!

The single setting which I think most important is the clearing of your browser cache whenever you exit all running instances of your browser. The browser cache stores web pages and their contents on your local drive so that subsequent page loads will be faster since content which has not changed can be read locally from your disk rather than downloading it again from the website.  This saves time (faster downloads) and in theory money (less bandwidth used). However, the cache also stores information to track you, not least of which are the ubiquitous cookie files.

I will have to assume you are using the latest version of Firefox as options are sometimes moved around between versions. So, in Firefox, click the 3 horizontal bars icon in the top-right corner and choose Settings. Then select “Privacy & Security” from the left-hand options. Scroll down to the History section. From the “Firefox will” drop-down options list choose “Use custom settings for history”.  Then select ON the checkboxes below that which are; (1) “Remember browsing and download history”, (2) “Remember search and form history”, and (3) |”Clear history when Firefox closes”.  Now click the “Settings…” button and make sure that all the options in the “History” section are selected ON. Save your selections by clicking the OK button.  You can now close the browser tab and the Settings window.

Clearing the cache is important to avoid and reduce tracking. Most of us are on high-speed bandwidth so time being saved is minimal and cost of our internet connections is usually low and fixed regardless of usage.

Ad-Blockers and Anti-Trackers

I often see people recommending Ghostery to remove tracking cookies and tracking features from websites/pages and AdBlock to remove adverts. They do the job but practices at both of these companies are, at least to some degree, questionable from what I have read. For example, they collect and sell surfing information although they claim to do so only in an anonymous way … hmm …. I suggest two alternatives which are:

For ad-blocking : Install the add-on uBlock Origin by Raymond Hill. An excellent add-on which is easy to switch on or off for any particular website. It also has a feature where you can right-click anywhere / anything on a web page or even an area on a webpage and tell uBlock Origin to hide it. It then creates a filter rule and removes that graphic, advert, panel, frame, whatever from the web page. Here is the blurb from them:

uBlock Origin is not an “ad blocker”, it’s a wide-spectrum content blocker with CPU and memory efficiency as a primary feature. Out of the box, uBO blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, etc.

For tracking prevention: Privacy Badger from EFF Technologies. Many, perhaps even most, tracking prevention tools use what is known as a blacklist or a whitelist – these are lists of trackers/websites to block or to allow respectively. Lists always present a problem of maintaining them and also who maintains them, in other words, quis custodiet ipsos custodes – who guards the guards?

Privacy Badger takes a different approach; it allows a website to install a cookie or even a tracking file (which reduces the chance of the website not loading properly if it was prevented outright) but then monitors whether that cookie/tracking file is used by any other website that you visit. If it is accessed by other websites then it blocks that access on the assumption that it is being used for tracking purposes. In addition, it removes Facebook, Twitter, Google, and similar widgets (and by widget I mean tracker) and replaces them with placeholders which you can choose to activate or not on a case by case basis. Here is the blurb from them:

Privacy Badger automatically learns to block invisible trackers. Instead of keeping lists of what to block, Privacy Badger automatically discovers trackers based on their behavior.

Privacy Badger sends the Global Privacy Control signal to opt you out of data sharing and selling, and the Do Not Track signal to tell companies not to track you. If trackers ignore your wishes, Privacy Badger will learn to block them.

Besides automatic tracker blocking, Privacy Badger replaces potentially useful trackers (video players, comments widgets, etc.) with click-to-activate placeholders, and removes outgoing link click tracking on Facebook and Google, with more privacy protections on the way.

These two add-ons are must-haves in my opinion. They are easy to install in Firefox and work seamlessly. They are also, importantly, easy to switch off for any website. In the case of uBlock Origin just click the icon and then click the large On/Off icon. For Privacy Badger just click the icon and choose “Disable for this site”. Your choices are remembered. I suggest that for those sites which you trust and do not want any possibility of problems that you switch these two add-ons off. For example, online banking websites, PayPal or similar payment sites, and sites which are legit but might use techniques like pop-up windows or require tracking cookies to track purchases across web pages, for example, from the vendor website to the payment site and back again. Having said that, I cannot remember ever actually having a problem with these two add-ons.

NB: Do not run multiple ad-blockers or multiple anti-tracking solutions. This often results in websites breaking and not loading or functioning properly. Remove any existing ad-blocker or anti-tracking add-on and then install these if you so wish.

The third add-on in this category which I think is very useful, but not a must-have, is called Cookie AutoDelete from CAD Team. This add-on, when activated, removes all cookies that a website created when all the tabs for that website are closed. By default it is off when installed but a simple click on the Auto-Clean Enabled button will activate it. It runs seamlessly with no action required by you. You can whitelist sites that you want to exempt. It is just another barrier to being tracked.

Internet Search

This is an easy one. Most browsers, such as Firefox, default to using Gulag Google as their search engine. Stop feeding the beast. Open Firefox and enter this in the URL bar: search.brave.com and press Enter to load that website. Now right click in that URL bar and choose the option “Add Brave Search”. This will add the Brave Search engine to your list of search engines in Firefox. Now click the 3 horizontal bars icon in the top-right corner and choose “Settings.” Then choose the Search option from the options on the left. In the section called “Default Search Engine” select the newly added Brave Search engine. Now Brave Search will become your default search engine whenever you type things in the URL bar. You can also add the Brave Search website to your favourites for quick access.

Tip: Note that on any webpage you can highlight a word (double click it or left-click, hold, and drag across several  words), let go of the left-mouse button, and then click the right-mouse button to popup a menu which has various options. One of the options allows you to directly search for the highlighted word(s) using your default search engine (hopefully not Gulag Search).

Thank you for reading. Part 2 will be posted if there is interest. And remember, if you’re using a service for free on the internet then it’s probably you that’s being sold.

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