- GhostSurf Review -

Sadly, the world is full of just too many nosy people. Some have the best intentions, some just want to make money, others are trying to rob you blind, but the one thing they have in common is that they're all a pain in ass! With all this talk about invasion of privacy, every time you sit down and browse the internet you feel like you have about 18 people hanging over your shoulder wondering what you're looking at, where you're going and what you're going to buy. Ghost Surf takes care of all that.

GhostSurf has always been a great privacy program but has gotten even better with the release of GhostSurf Platinum 2005. Major improvements over previous Ghost Surf versions in the ad control and anti spyware features make GhostSurf a total solution to all privacy concerns. You may want to download GhostSurf now, install it and follow along. The review for the previous version, GhostSurf Pro, is still posted as a service for those who still use it but it is no longer available for download.

First and foremost, Ghost Surf is NOT a firewall program. Internet hackers using auto bot programs to look for open ports is a completely different problem. If you're worried about that, check out the Armor2Net review which contains lots of general firewall information as well as complete details for Armor2Net. What we're talking about here is a bit more personal. Let me explain:

When you surf web sites, 3 things happen that you may: not be aware of that can cause potential problems:

1) IP Address
a) When you send a request to a web site, the IP address of your computer goes with it.
b) Your ISP gets a nice list of the web sites you've been going to and judging from the recent record company lawsuits, they don't have any problem sharing that information. If you're going through a proxy server at work, your IT department - and then your boss - gets to look at where you're going.

2) Cookies
a) Some web sites put malicious cookies on your PC to gather personal information.

3) Data Storage
a) Your PC keeps a history of all of the web sites you've visited recently which is available on the browser's address bar or on the hard drive.
b) Your PC also keeps the most recently viewed pages cached on your hard drive.
c) Your PC also keeps track of recently accessed documents, programs and pictures.

Tracks of where you've been are all over the place! Here's how Ghost Surf solves that.



Security - Hiding your IP Address and Cookies

You don't have to take my word that GhostSurf hides your IP address. You can find proof by going to the Shields Up site with GhostSurf OFF and you'll notice that the web page will show your IP address. Close the web site, turn GhostSurf on and try Shield Up again. The page will be different now because they can't read your IP address. They can't do a test probe on your ports because they now don't know who you are!

Think of your IP Address as the internet address of your computer. Ghost Surf blocks this by sending your request to a web site to a series of anonymous hubs which in turn passes the request along to the destination with your IP Address deleted. With this feature activated, the web site thinks the request is coming from the anonymous hub. Your ISP or an employer watching your network connection will think you're just endlessly looking at the same site which is the anonymous hub. Please don't take this an invitation for illegal or unethical activities. Put bluntly, Ghost Surf is here to help you avoid the many prying eyes that want a piece of your privacy and is not a tool to help you launch a career in crime. If you're suspected of criminal behavior, an ISP, Government agency or even an employer could tap your Internet connection and actually read everything that goes back and forth. This method is too time consuming and expensive to do to everyone. The huge amount of web traffic handled by an ISP or an IT department usually limits the amount of spying to the creation of a log of the websites you visit. Ghost Surf will change that list of websites to a list of visits to an anonymous hub and protect your privacy.

During setup, these hubs are automatically set up.

With all the bad press Cookies have gotten, you'd think that Satan himself made them up to curse the internet. Are they that bad? Well, yes and no. Cookies are small bits of information stored on your PC so a web site can identify you. This can be very useful. Say you go to Amazon.com and put 20 things in your cart, don't have time to place your order, and turn your PC off. When you go back to that site from that computer, your cart is as you left it because a cookie on your PC points to a database created on the Amazon site. Since cookies never store personal information on it like charge card numbers, they are a big help on shopping sites. Other sites aren't that nice. Some cookies are placed without your knowledge and root around to see what other web sites you've been going to as well as how often. When first using GhostSurf, what really amazed me was all of the cookies put on my system by images on some of the popular news websites.

I know some people who deal with this by turning off the cookies on the web browser but this is as bad as turning off javascript. The functionality of your browser is severely reduced to the point that some sites just stop working. Ghost Surf's privacy control center has a solution.

Below is a reduced view of GhostSurf's main page.



Click on the "Key" icon to open the privacy control center or choose the appropriate menu item from the pop up menu when you right click on the "Eye" icon in your taskbar.



The main information box in the window has six tabs at the top. Click on the "Privacy" tab.

With the privacy tab selected, you'll notice the box on the left has a slider bar that determines the level of security. The "Advanced" button will open a page that will allow you to select the components individually. Below is a brief explanation of how the four levels of privacy on the slider bar relate to the choices on the advanced page.

1) Normal --------- Nothing activated
2) Anonymous ------ Blocks Cookies
3) Invisible ------ also Hides IP Address
4) Secure --------- also Encrypts Data

With some sites, privacy either isn't a concern. Ghost surf allows you to identify those sites and exempt them from the privacy settings. To add a site to the list, just select the "Special Sites" tab and add the urls you want to be exempt.

The "Traffic" tab lists sites that have gone through the GhostSurf proxy from the internet. The "Whois" button on the bottom of the window allows you to get information about a site's webmaster.

GhostSurf's privacy features also extend to Usenet, IRC chat, and instant messaging. Click on the "Add-Ons" tab to see which of these features are active and which need to be installed. Please note that ISP based newsgroups usually need to see your IP address to verify that you are a customer and activating GhostSurf's privacy features may prevent access. Using public newsgroups would prevent that problem.

Other options such as starting GhostSurf on bootup can be found by selecting the "Options" tab.



Deleting records

Your PC seems to hide records of everything all over the place and there's always someone who feels obligated to mind YOUR business and snoop around in those records. You can delete this information yourself but it's spread around all over the place and there's always something you miss. GhostSurf's Tracks Cleaner feature allows you to erase all or none of the following: web history, temporary web files, cookies, address bar, recycle bin, recent documents, recent programs, recent pictures, MS Office recent documents, and any custom folder or file you select.



The column on the left can be scrolled up or down to reveal the many feature.

The "Wipe Now" icon will display the default list of files to be erased. Select as many or as few of them as you like and press "Go" to delete them.

To add or remove items on the Wipe Now list, click on the "Elements to Wipe" icon. This will display a list of elements such as toolbars, Browsers, MS Office programs, multimedia, etc. To have one of these elements appear on the Wipe Now list, be sure that it is "activated". This is done by selecting the element and clicking the "Activate" button. The following example explains this function further.

The following image shows that "Yahoo Messenger Cache" is inactive.



Since it is inactive, it won't appear on the Wipe Now list shown below.




After selecting "Yahoo Messenger Cache" and clicking the "Activate" button, the symbol by the element turns green and the status changes to "Active".



The following image shows that the element now appears on the Wipe Now list.



If you don't think you need this feature, scroll down on the options and click on the "View Traces" icon.

A list of folders containing some of the tracks you've left behind will be shown; tracks that nosey coworkers can easily find. If there are certain web sites or cookies that you'd like to keep, select them and click the "Protect" button to prevent their deletion.

Items to the View Traces window from the Protected Elements window; click on the "Protected Elements" icon to open it. You will see the same list of folders that is present in the View Traces window. To add other folders to the list, click the add button and add the item of your choice. Remember that you can protect individual items through the View Traces window while you can protect entire folders by using the Protected Elements window.

Deleted files can be recovered as is shown by some of the other programs on this site. GhostSurf, however, offers several deletion techniques of various levels which can be accessed by clicking on the "Strength" icon.

Even the most basic deletion method, Quick Wipe, will prevent undeletion by most software. At midrange is a variation of the secure file deletion technique published by Department of Defense, Manual 5220.22 M. This requires that the file be overwritten with 0's, then 1's, and then random data; and further stipulates that, for top secret data, the disk on which the file is written must be degaussed, and then destroyed.

Obviously, GhostSurf doesn't degauss or destroy your disk but it does write over the file with 0's, 1's and then random data. The most secure and time consuming method is Gutmann's Algorithm which is a 35 pass method that removes the magnetic remnants on the disk's surface. This prevents recovery based on hardware as well as software.

The check box options add more complexity and allow you to choose various random number generators such as the Mersenne Twister for a more rigorous deletion.

Now that you've selected what you want to delete, you can automate the process using the Scheduling feature; click on the "Scheduling" icon to bring up the window. By scheduling regular wipes, you ensure that your privacy; after all, none of these features are really worth anything if you forget to use them. Wipes can be scheduled for every boot up, whenever a browser closes or at a regular time interval. The History and Reporting options let you keep track of your wipes and even email the results to the email address of your choice.

Other features such as password protection, or a boss key can be found on the options window.

Spyware Detection

Another bane of PC users that GhostSurf corrects is SpyWare. If you think you don't have spyware on your PC, then you haven't looked. I've seen PCs so badly infected that they crashed on bootup because the spyware ate up all the memory resources. The new SpyCatcher features are a major improvement over previous versions of GhostSurf and can help your PC run much better. Click on the SpyCatcher icon to open the SpyCatcher Page.



As with other GhostSurf windows, the features are accessed by clicking on the icons in the column on the left.

To perform a spyware sweep, select the "Sweep Spyware" icon, select the drives to sweep and click "go". The spyware that is found will be listed in the "Found Spyware" window where you can get more information on it or disable it. If you don't want some spyware removed, you can select it and click the "Allow" button which will put it on the "Allowed Spyware" page.

If you suspect that your system has been compromised by a specific type of spyware, such as a keylogger, you can make the scan faster by selecting only that type of spyware. Click on the "ScanTypes" icon to open the window and you'll see a complete list of the types of spyware that GhostSurf looks for. Deselect all types you're not interested in looking for and the scan will run faster. You should reenable all types after the scan. Generally, it is not recommended to disable certain types of spyware regularly because it will reduce your level of protection.

Some users still like "Ad Supported Software" which is a free software package with tons of spyware attached. If you remove the spyware, the software package you want stops working. Placing the spyware on the "Allowed Spyware" page, allows you to protect some spyware while getting rid of the rest. You also have the option of temporarily disabling the protected spyware.

Spyware continues to get more sophisticated but GhostSurf has kept up. I remember removing some spyware files from a PC only to see them regenerate before my eyes! One of GhostSurf's new features is "Reinstall Shield" which overwrites deleted software with zeros and then locks the file so it can't reinstall itself. Another new feature is Protector which monitors certain spyware targets. Protector will monitor your memory for running spyware, keep your web browser home page from being modified and more. Click on the "Protector" icon to access this page.

GhostSurf makes it easy to track everything that's running on your PC with SpyCatcher's Detective feature. Bring up the Detective page by clicking on the "Detective" icon and you'll see folders for Memory, Start up Menu, Registry Start Menu, IE plug-ins and ActiveX components. Each component within any folder can be accessed, disabled or researched. A perfect tool to ferret out rogue processes.

To keep your spyware definitions up to date, click on the "Updates" icon which will automatically search for new spyware definitions.

SpyCatcher also has reporting, scheduling and history features that are similar to those found on TracksCleaner.

AdArmor

Another way to ruin your surfing pleasure is to paste popups and other types of ads all over your screen. Not only does this take up system resources, clutter your hard drive and slow down your browser, but it also wastes hours of time closing the pages. Which makes you wonder; "Does anyone ever look at these things?" Someone must or these ghastly ads would only be a bad memory. Thanks to GhostSurf, you don't have to spend your time looking at internet ads.

The ad control features, called AdArmor, is another major improvement with GhostSurf Platinum 2005 over previous versions. Click on the "AdArmor" icon to open this window. You'll notice the page setup, like TracksCleaner and SpyCatcher, has a column of options to the left that allow you block certain ads, exempt others, update the advertiser list and more.



The "Options" and "Advanced" windows allow a wide range of control in blocking popups, ad images, and more. Along with ads, you can also block auto window resize, ActiveX commands, meta refresh, auto flash play and more. Having some of these features active is vital for some web sites so don't automatically block everything. Tailor your options to your surfing habits.

You can exempt certain sites using the "Allowed Sites" window or the "Advertisers" windows. The Allowed Sites window will not block specific sites while the Advertisers window will allow certain advertisers on all sites.

As with the other features in GhostSurf, you can automatically update the blocked advertiser list.



Data Vault

As a final piece of PC security, GhostSurf added a Data Vault where you can store personal files. Clicking on the "Personal Data Vault" icon will open the window.



To create a vault, just type a name and password then click "ok". The default location of the valut is c:\Documents and Settings\"UserName"\Application Data\Tenebril\PDV Storage\All\"Data Vault Name" where "UserName" is the name of the user logged in who created it and the "Data Vault Name" is the name you gave it when it was created. You can specify a custom path if you want.

The vault looks and works like windows explored; just drag and drop any file you want into the vault. Files placed in the vault will be encrypted and the original will be securely deleted. The personal data vault also has the ability to burn CDs and DVDs so you can quickly back up your files.



Conclusion and registration

GhostSurf has everything you want in a program: it's not intrusive, easy to use, has lots of features, and most important it really works. After you configure it, you can turn it on and forget about it as it does it work in the background.

As mentioned before, you can prove that GhostSurf works by going to the Shields Up site and noticing the difference with GhostSurf on and off. They can't do a test probe on your ports because they now don't know who you are!

Older versions of GhostSurf were well worth the registration fee but improvements found in the new version make registering this program a bargain. The SpyWare features have advanced dramatically to keep up with new spyware tricks. The AdControl features are also much improved.

GhostSurf also works well with WebVacuum. Configuration details can be found on WebVacuum's review page.

When registering, please support the Shareware Genie and use the link found withing the program. You can download the trial version by clicking on the button below. I hope you find the program useful and would like to hear your comments at




- Dave -