Tor and Proxies

Your IP address identifies where your traffic comes from. In authorized red-team work, research, or privacy contexts, you may need to obscure the source of your connections.

This lesson covers proxies and Tor, two foundational tools for hiding the origin of network traffic. We focus on how they work and their limits.

A proxy server sits between you and your destination. You send requests to the proxy, and it forwards them on your behalf, so the destination sees the proxy's IP instead of yours.

• HTTP proxy: handles web traffic.
• SOCKS proxy: protocol-agnostic, handles any TCP traffic.