Everybody welcomes the next video.
So in this video what are we talking about something called a proxy.
Now I know I've mentioned this before.
We've kind of been over it briefly but we're going to go a little bit more into what a proxy is now
a proxy acts as a gateway between a client and another end point.
So whether that's a client to client Client Server server to client whatever the case might be it sits
in between and let's pack traffic passed through it.
Now what it does when the traffic passes through it is what makes the proxy so interesting now a proxy
can do a lot of things they can do stuff as filtering traffic.
So for example if you're work or employment or school does not allow you to view a certain type of Web
sites like a lot of enterprises won't let you you advertise minute Web sites or they will block let's
say pornography sites or anything that has malicious links on it they'll automatically block that that
occurs through a proxy in most cases.
Now there's other ways of doing it such as something like Open DNS which allows you it basically handles
the DNS resolving and then if it were tries to resolve to something that's on a blocked list it will
not allow it.
However in most cases this is going through the corporate world especially in the the academic world
for schools they tend to use a proxy server for this.
Now you could also use this to hide your traffic.
So if you wanted to connect to your own local machine at home and then route your internet traffic through
that and act is your own home as a proxy while you're out and about you can do that and hide the traffic
and bypass a lot of the restrictions that the either the employment or the the school might have in
place.
Now that's important because it allows you to get around blocked resources.
This is also used by red teams to bypass any blocks that might been put into place by the blue team.
So the blue team automatically starts blocking stuff.
Then you might run into a problem.
So if that's the case you can use a proxy around it you can also use a VPN to go around it as well.
You have quite a few options but that's tends to be what you're going to use it for in most cases from
a red team's perspective.
Now quick thing on a reverse proxy a reverse proxy is commonly used for load balancing or high availability.
This allows a client to interact with possibly 10 20 30 thousand different servers all by talking to
one end point or one IP address.
Now this is as I brought up before in previous videos something called a proxy is a good example of
what a reverse proxy is.
So if you want you can take a little bit of time and research what a proxy is and how it works.
You don't have to go through the whole process of setting it up and making sure it's all configured.
Just getting a good understanding of what it works and how it works sometimes it might be good to ask
the local administrator I.T. team for your place of work or your school to find out what what they use
do they use a proxy server or do they use a reverse proxy.
What do they do they use DNS to block everything.
Sometimes it's interesting and you might get a lot of different answers depending on how people set
things up.
So I just want you to be familiar with what they are.
Now that we've actually gone over it and then where some of these can be put into place.