14 DAY TRIAL // The famous Tor browsers, network and VPNs became a favorite among all sorts of cunning, savvy activists, whistleblowers and other publicly wanted figures to hide their identity, IPs, and other forms of digital shadows when tracked by authorities.
Now when you get to look at the list of TOR's sponsors and you see names like the State Department, DARPA and the Navy, you should get very realistic about how effectively this thing really "hides" your data when people really start to look for you.
However, Benjamin Caudill and his Rhino Security Labs launched a hardware proxy that allows users to connect to a far-away public Wi-Fi network over a low-frequency radio connection, making it a tad more difficult for cops and other "spies" to find the real source of the internet traffic.
Apparently, Proxyham is made of a Raspberry Pi computer with a Wi-Fi card, connected to three antennas, a Wi-Fi one that connects to the Internet in a public space, and a dual antenna that transmits at 900MHz, and it is used to communicate and beam data back and forth with the user, who can be as far as 2.5 miles from the device.
Basic tech goes a long way
To connect to the device, a user should leave it in a Wi-Fi area, and with a 900Mhz antenna, they could surf the Internet from 2.5 miles away without showing their actual IP publicly except the one from the Proxyham. The range comes obviously from the said 900Mhz antenna.
Combine this with some good practices of deleting cookies and not logging into social media websites with regularity, if ever, and using this device in places like a school or library will probably offer the user a high degree of immunity.
Selling it for $200, Caudill hopes that it will add to itsome Bond-esque features like a self-destruct function and will enable it to record and send the audio of the last few seconds before destruction by the user, acting like a digital black box for the ex Proxyham user.
This is indeed a funky device to play spies with, but showing it at Def Con this year, as Caudill plans to, and releasing its blueprint and source code will turn this thing into nothing more than a toy for kids who watch too many spies movies.