I accepted long ago that there is no such thing as internet security. Just look at the targetted ads that follow you where-ever you go.
Oh sure, the NSA, DOD and the rest of the government created the TOR
Network, but don’t have the Keys. Sure, and I have bridge for sale ...
The weakest link in TOR is the last computer in your proxy chain.
Your communications comes out of that machine without encryption unless your target machine on the internet is SSL.
The next weakest link is you are able to be tracked by traffic analysis. It’s best for you if you run a TOR node since you are then handling traffic all the time and it’s impossible to filter out any traffic as being from you.
Next best thing to running a node is to not just jump on and start surfing...run TOR a while and do casual unimportant stuff on the connection and switch identities a few times and then later do anything sensitive... I prefer to get an exit node that is outside the US, Canada, UK, AUS, NZ....
Some people use a commercial proxy chain or VPN to then connect to TOR..this may be a bit more secure than TOR alone. try the free version of the VPN at http://proxpn.com/ it’s speed limited in the free version but adequate for web browsing.
Before using TOR for anything truly sensitive read all the relative info on the TOR site first!
I have a PC that is on the other side of the hardware firewall... I use it as a honeypot so I can watch and see who is interested in probing my ip. I have seen a lot of interesting stuff. There are tons of Chinese hacker attacks... I’d be surprised if a machine could stay uninfected for more than an hour without a firewall. A strange series of probes once occurred after I made a post on FR.... I went back and checked and a relatively new freeper had placed an image in a thread that was pointed to a server with a plain ip address. This was probably a server on their PC that was serving up the image and they were looking at the logs and probing the ip of anyone who read the thread.
My main PC is behind the firewall plus once a day it gets reloaded from a disk image so it’s always shiny and new... nothing stays put and nothing can alter eeprom on the mainboard or the HD boot sector. Data to be saved is sent to an external encrypted drive. The real machine is Linux, the honeypot is Windows ;-)
Bttt