Pune techie murder: How tech is manipulated to incite mobs

by Nikhil Subramaniam

The lynching of a young Muslim techie in Pune by a rightwing Hindu mob over morphed Facebook images has shaken the country, and exposed yet again, the danger of how social media and the Internet can be used to sow racial discord and mob violence, with those responsible able to get off scot free.

A report in the Hindustan Times has revealed that the post in question was uploaded via proxy servers from four countries with the uploaders IP address almost impossible to find.

Staying anonymous or hiding your location when connected to the Internet is not the easiest of tasks. Websites, services and trackers are always looking and watching, seeing where you are, and what tools you are using to access the Internet (such as your browser, device etc), but there are tools readily available to avoid detection and stay under the radar.

Here we take a look at the tech behind anonymity, and what tools hackers and other people commonly use to avoid detection:

Hide the IP

Every PC has a unique IP address provided by your Internet Service Provider, (ISP) which is noted by websites you visit along with a datestamp. The reasons could be for simple logging and unique hit counts for the web page, but it’s also great when trying to pinpoint problems.

So if you try to hack in to the backend of a website back-end or place an offensive comment, the website’s administrator can track the origin of the page visit or comment. And with a few phone calls and emails to your ISP, you can be tracked down in a matter of minutes.

Complicating things is that an IP address cannot be changed easily. Dynamic IP address changes every time you reconnect your Internet connection, these addresses are still logged in their records. Changing a static IP address is not at all easy as it involves contacting the ISP, and the change can take days to take effect. In any case, you cannot do this without getting the attention of others.

So how did those responsible for the inflammatory Facebook post that resulted in the death of the Pune techie do it? They seem to have masked their IP by having another IP as a layer over it. This is known as a virtual IP address and can help you avoid being tracked down.

Using proxy websites

A web-based proxy service allows users to surf other websites by using the Internet connection at the proxy server’s end. What it actually does is tunnel your connection through another PC somewhere in the world. The browsing or downloading speed totally depends on their (the service’s) Internet connection speeds and the number of people accessing the same service at that time. The speed of your Internet connection does not matter in this case.

If you go through a proxy service such as Vtunnel or imsly or anonymise.us onto other websites, the IP address of the proxy server is logged as your IP address. For example, if the proxy service is in Uganda and you are in India and using it to access a website in Australia, the Australian website thinks that you have logged in from Uganda. By hopping proxy servers,many hackers can set whoever is looking for you on a wild goose chase. This also may have been done by the Facebook mischief mongers in the Pune case. The Hindustan report says that the post seems have to be logged in via servers from Saudi Arabia, Romania and two other countries.

Browser add-ons or plug-ins These fulfil the same criteria as proxy sites, but work on a browser level. A proxy add-on for Firefox and Chrome can easily be found on their respective stores. You’ll need to feed in a proxy server’s IP addresses along with the port numbers, and switch to the server while browsing.

Using a tunneling service By far the most secure way of masking your IP is TOR, a proxy service hosted by a group of people favouring anonymity on the Internet. TOR, short for The Onion Router, is intended to enable online anonymity and its name implies the many layers of security in-built into the system. People only have to download the installer from www.torproject.org and run it. It is designed to direct all your Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers to conceal the users location from anyone who is out there conducting an online surveillance. With Tor, you can hop and randomly change routes to help obfuscate your tracks.

Even though Tor is is intended to protect Internet freedom, it can also be used to connect to the so-called Dark Net, where websites such as Silk Road are found.

Using VPN (Virtual Private Network) services Alternatively, hackers could use a VPN service that sets up a connection that is channeled through your ISP to a private network that has open Internet access. This is especially popular when dodging regional restrictions on surfing. However, the big catch is there are very few free VPN services but you could try a free service such as Hotspot Shield. Another problem with VPN services is that they are ad-supported so you are likely to see a number of pop-ups during your open access session.

The biggest challenges for law enforcement and governments are the proliferation of masking tools and the difficulty in tracking down users when they use them. One can’t help but think their use is exacerbated by wide-scale State-backed spying. With governments spreading their surveillance nets wider and wider, the chances of such tools being used to spread hate speech and rumour-mongering or even for regular browsing only go up.