Chaining The Proxies With ProxyChains

In this tutorial, we will learn to redirect our TCP traffics through the chain of proxies using a well known tool named ProxyChains.

ProxyChains is a tool for tunneling TCP and DNS traffics through chain of several proxy servers which supports HTTP, SOCKS4, and SOCKS5 proxy servers. Hence, this tool leverages several usages such as anonymity, bypassing filters, running any program through proxy servers, etc.

You can DOWNLOAD proxychains from SourceForge. In ubuntu, you can directly install it from repos:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install proxychains

Once you have installed the proxychains, you need to configure this tool. The global configuration file is located at /etc/proxychains.conf so if you wish to have your own configuration file, you could either create the proxychains.conf file in the current working directory or at $HOME/.proxychains/proxychains.conf.

In my example, I'll edit the global configuration file by issuing the command:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo nano /etc/proxychains.conf

First, we will have to select the kind of chaining option we want to use. We can use one of the dynamic_chain, strict_chain, and random_chain chaining options. In most cases, it is good to just use the dynamic_chain so we uncomment the line containing dynamic_chain and comment all other chaining options.



Then we need to grab some proxies and then insert at the end of our configuration file which would look like:

socks4 127.0.0.1 9050
socks5 192.168.2.90 3128
socks5 1**.1**.*.* 8080

You could add as much as proxy servers in the list. Btw, the asterisks in the above example do not mean wildcards, they are just there to symbolize some proxy server. There are free sites on the Internet which provide big database of different kinds of proxies. Even several proxy scrapers are available all over the internet and you could even write one on your own. So getting list of good proxies is not the difficult job. Once you finish the configuration, you can run any command through proxychains. The syntax is as simple as below:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ proxychains <any_command>

For example, below is the example nmap scan run through the proxychains:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ proxychains nmap -p 1-1000 -O victim.tld

P.S. If you are interested in some GUI for using proxychains, you can use ProxyChainsGUI. Lastly, the default package from Ubuntu repository seems to be missing the proxyresolv command so I would recommend to compile the source code locally.