HideMyAss VPN

Friday, May 17, 2013

How to Secure Firefox (with a lot of links to tools and add-ons)

I'd like for people to come together and compare the different addons that we have for Firefox which make internet surfing a better and safer experience.

  1. Start Firefox in Privacy mode (http://bit.ly/9c9bzl)
  2. Make the Homepage a IP-Checker (http://www.ip-adress.com/) or try an addon that warns you of an IP change (http://bit.ly/cjaELd)
  3. The problem with Privacy mode is that all the links/bookmarks will not save, thus you can use a synching tool - http://bit.ly/cMipZn OR http://bit.ly/dqkRo0
  4. Use NoScript - http://bit.ly/ccbv0n

This addon makes you select whether scripts should be allowed on the pages you visit - also a good way to look at which sites have what scripts.
  • Use AdBlock Plus - http://bit.ly/xRJb8 A great program that blocks ads, thus also blocking a good amount of Malware (by not letting you to click on the links)
  • Better Privacy - http://bit.ly/aYdQmH Deletes LSO's, not sure that privacy mode allows these to save permanently.
  • Force-TLS http://bit.ly/dcWqH4 Basically makes the browser (if there's a choice) to make a HTTPS connection to a site.
Great tool for passwords, if you remember the password, then it's not secure enough. Invest 12$ for a year that will give you access to some great second layer verification. Then you can also access all your passwords from phones, etc. It also allows you to save forms - thus you can save your credit card details, etc. You are taking a chance of storing such data in one place, so the 12$ investment is a good idea.
  • Ghostery - http://bit.ly/9Y5jaW Blocks information flow to AD agencies about your habits (use with NoScript)

Use of Facebook(remember to config your privacy settings) :
There have been some disturbing news about Facebook using your surfing habbits for targeted ads (while you're logged on).
Because of this, there are a few addons towards Facebook:

The addons for facebook are old, use the Adblock addons in conjunction with the ExException to clear up your experiance in FB.
  1. AntiSocial - DEAD
  2. No FB Tracking - OLD
  3. remove all facebook ads - OLD

For some people this doesn't work (old addon) , but it works for me.

Final Step:
Always use Firefox (or any Internet Browser) within a Sandbox (http://bit.ly/Ro4z)
It takes a bit of time to get used to the Sandboxie usage (especially once you have to remember that updates have to be done outside the sandbox) but it can save you from a very good amount of viruses/trojans and other nasty tings.

Also, there's a tool called VPNcheck - http://bit.ly/d8VK0x
The program will kill any program of your choice (Firefox/uTorrent etc) if you get a drop in the VPN connection. Though it might become obsolete once the IP Bind program within the VPN goes Alpha.

Similarly you can check out the great article of constricting your Internet Connection with a COMODO firewall through the VPN IP ranges - http://bit.ly/b3EC07

These are some of the addons that I use with my FireFox. I'd love to learn about other people's internet browser configuration. Also, I'd love to hear how people use other browsers (Chrome/Opera) as Firefox is a bit Clunky, but I haven't seen a good enough of a security with the other browsers.


UA is an interesting thing, you can go through forums and see the members-only links by masking yourself as a googlebot (use the Switcher for that) otherwise use UAControl and set the default to block.
  • RefControl - http://bit.ly/hmL3AW Similar to UAControl, set it to block and add the exceptions for sites that don't work - wordpress, etc.



  • ExExceptions - http://bit.ly/oXQzlN Last defense against ads/popups. This will block them, similar to editing your hosts fie.




In the end, you ought to use a couple checking sites:
http://ip-check.info/?lang=en and IP-score.com are good ones.

Stay safe.

OH and remember to use CCleaner with secure deletion time to time.

No comments:

Post a Comment