It’s not very hard to find free public proxy servers on the internet, but finding free non-public proxy servers can be difficult.

If you want to find these, you need a few things (but the good news is that they don’t cost anything). The first thing you’ll need is an IP Scanner – the one recommended in this article is called SuperScan v4.0. You can easily find it by searching Google or Yahoo!, and as mentioned, it is free.

Download the program and install it. Once this is done, you must configure the scan settings, so choose “Port list setup”, and you will be able to choose which ports you want to scan. Ports 6588, 80, 8080 and 3128 tend to be the best for finding HTTP Proxy servers. If you are locking for a SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 server, port 1080 is typically the best.

Select “Ok” to finish setup and it will save the port list. For the other settings, try these for the timeout values:

Ping: 500
Connect: 2000
Read: 4000

Timeout value basically means the time that the scanner should wait before trying a different IP address if it doesn’t receive a response. The settings referenced about work for most high-speed connections, but you may want to adjust them based on your internet connection.

Now, you must select the IP address range, which for must users is the most complicated part of the process.

You must put a decent IP range in order to increase your chances of finding good proxy servers. Do some research and find a working proxy online to use as an example. Let’s say that you find an HTTP proxy that has an IP address of 233.45.78.15; this means that you should set your IP address range to between 233.45.78.1 and 233.45.78.255. Most likely, you will have some success and find some proxies using these search criteria – save these in a text file.

It is recommended that you try out “Charon”, which is great software. It can be used to check and verify proxies, and will prove to be very important to this whole operation.

Using Charon, you can check all the IP addresses that you received through the scan results. Simply load in the list from SuperScan, and then select “Check Proxies”, and then “Check Anonymity of All Proxies”. This will help you greatly in searching for all different types of proxy servers.