Scanning - Proxies

Introduction

So you need some proxies so you don't get the FBI knocking on your door? The best way is to find them yourself and you've come to the right place to do just that.

Necessary Tools

*NOTE: I have downloads restricted to hits from my site, so if you get "403 Forbidden" your browse or download manager is not sending a proper referral link. Try using IE, hold shift (bypasses download managers), and left click the link, that should defiantly work.

• Proxy Hunter v3.1 B1 - Used to scan for proxies of any kind.
• FlashFXP - A great ftp client designed with the FXP Groups in mind. (Used in Proxy FAQ)

Installation & Setup

First thing you need to do is install Proxy Hunter, just run the setup program and let it do it's thing. Now extract the settings file somewhere so we can import it to PH (Proxy Hunter). Start up PH and and go to the menu System -> Load Options, and point it to the file you just extracted. I'm sure exactly what options this loads but I'm pretty sure it loads the verifying web pages and nothing else.

Now go to System -> Change Options and make sure it's on the "Search&Verify Options" tab. Here you can change the Parallel Sockets to a suitable number depending on your machine and connection. I have DSL and P3 500MHz and I use 260 for Searching and 120 for Verifying. With 56k the default settings should be good. You can also adjust the timeout settings depending on how through you want your search to be. For searching I have my timeouts set to 10s and 20s, and for Verifying 10s and 45s.

On the "Other Options" tab you can set it up to redial your modem if you get disconnected, and there are also some other options which do not really affect scanning and can be adjusted to your liking.

Picking an IP Range

I have found no way to find good proxy ranges yet. I usually just scan the ranges I have found a lot of pubs on and that seems to work. If you don't pub scan yourself check out some scan posts and see what ip's they are scanning. Once you find something that looks good move onto the next section.

Scan Away

First thing we need to do is get the ip that was picked into the queue, this is fairly tricky as there are many options and types of proxies you can scan for. On the "Tasks" pane on the main window click the "Add Task" button at the bottom of the program. Select "searching Task" and click next. On this screen press the "Add" button on the right and it will bring up another dialog box. I personally like to scan whole ranges at a time (216.5.0.0-216.5.255.255) and PH gives us an easy way to enter this. If you want to scan just specific gaps of ips use the "Start&End Range" option. Otherwise to use my method select "Start + Subnet Size" and plug your ip into the "Start addr:" blank. Change the last two number to zero and then enter "1B" in the "Subnet size:" blank. If you want to scan more that one range in a row change the value 1B accordingly (2B, 3B, 4B, etc.). Once you have this ready press ok and it will enter into the box as a start and end range for you.

Click Next again and go to the next section, here you pick what ports you want to scan and what types of proxies your looking for. I only scan for SOCKS proxies because they are the most useful for pubbing and scanning for pubs. Click the "Defined" button and a box should load that is blank. Press the "open" button here and load the Default settings for this box (only needs to be done once). This now shows pretty much all the different types of proxies you can scan for. For now just select the one listed as Protocol "SOCKS" and then click use. It will ask you "Must Try?" and what this means is if the connection fails to the IP should it try this one anyway (only useful when scanning multiple ports). Just press yes saying it should always check for SOCKS on Port 1080.

Now you can press finish and it will add your ip to the queue. You can queue up as much as you'd like and once your ready press the blue play button in the upper right corner of the program. This will start the search for SOCKS proxies. During the scan you can switch over to the "Results" tab to see what it is finding. I'll explain what all this means in the next section.

Results

On the "Results" you can see exactly what is being found with your scan, don't be discouraged if nothing is there, it takes a while before any are found sometimes. Once it does find some it will immediately test them out for you and list the Status in that column. Here is what some of the status messages mean:

• GOOD! - Duh... a good working proxy
• Not Matching - The proxy can be connected to but the data received does not match what is expected (This is rare for SOCKS proxies)
• Undecidable - Based on the information returned PH cannot decide if this proxy should be marked "GOOD!" or "Not Matching"
• Unknown - PH cannot tell what the heck this is
• Protocol Error - The port scanned is open but when trying to use the protocol being tested an error was received
• Need Authentication - This proxy server needs a username and password
• Connection Failed - The ip being tested is rejecting your connection to that port
• Connection Timeout - The proxy is not responding to the connection request
• Verification Timeout - It connected to the proxy but cannot verify due to a timeout.

Once it is done scanning I like to sort it by "Timing" by pressing the title of that column until the GOOD proxies are on top. This sorts it with the quickest to respond proxies on the top, using these will give you faster connection times.