The people selling pre-configured virtual machines and OS on USB memory stick packages here have approximately a 99.99% chance of not being qualified to properly secure a system. Approximately 95% of people who are not properly qualified to secure a system think that they are properly qualified to secure a system Approximately 100% of federal police agencies would try to get vendors to use their virtual machines with bugging software in them, it is a real attack vector to worry about There are already free operating systems that can be installed to USB memory sticks or used in virtual machines, such as tails and liberte. These are much less likely to be backdoored and although they are not professionally hardened they are very likely to be better than anything you get here. ____________________________ If someone wants you to use their bridge or suggests a VPN service to you, they have a 95.51% chance of being a fed No matter what, if your entry and exit traffic are monitored by the same attacker, you are deanonymized. Adding more hops results in rapidly decreasing anonymity gains. One hop is a tremendous improvement over none. Two hops is a tremendous improvement over one. Three hops is a significant improvement over two. Four hops is a very slight improvement over three. People who sell VPNs generally don't have a fucking clue what they are talking about. A huge number of VPN services keep logs, even if they say they do not. ____________________ Your Anti Virus and Anti Spyware are not good enough to detect viruses or spyware custom made to pwn you. _____________________ Watch out for sales people. Any jackass with a bit of experience can throw together something and sell it as the best thing since sliced bread. This happens a lot. A lot of them actually believe that they know what they are doing. Don't trust sales people with your security. Don't believe what you are told, research yourself, and please don't research through the resources made available to you by people selling shit. This is not to say all products that are for sale are insecure or bad. It is simply to say that I want to vomit when I see people selling 'ultra secure virtual machine images!!!' on SR.