The credit crunch is hitting hard, the world financial institutions are in turmoil but one thing stays the same, people still delude themselves that they can protect themselves online using free anonymous proxies.
If you wanted to find a list of the most hacked, insecure and badly administered servers you'd find a pretty good candidate on the many free anonymous proxies lists that float around on the internet.
It's true, a server usually gets on these lists by either being hacked, set up badly or deliberately set up to steal peoples personal information.
Virtually none of these servers are set up on purpose to allow anonymous surfing, the only ones that are have identity thieves sitting on them running sniffers and installing various malware on the clients that connect.
You'd have to be crazy to send all your personal data, all your browsing via one of these servers unless you knew who was running it and why.
Yet people do it all the time, find a list on the internet - read some line like - {IP Address} - Highly Secure Anonymous Proxy - Russia Then send all their internet traffic via this one server, so just let me spell it out what that line probably really means {IP Address} - Insecure Hacked Server - Run by Russian Identity thieves It's fantastic news for the hackers, instead of trying to intercept traffic, send phishing emails or bombard clients with malware to steal identities.
All they have to do is load up a hacked server with a network sniffer, install lots of nasty trojans and viruses and perform the final act - install a simple proxy server and wait.
Pretty soon network scans will pick up this open proxy server and it will appear in the lists, after that there will be a mad scramble as people send all their data down this 'anonymous proxy' .
It's about as far from secure surfing as you can possibly get!