The Netrunner’s Guide to Going Dark

In the neon haze of the sprawl, the Net is a hunting ground, and every runner is both predator and prey. Data is the lifeblood of the system, and every keystroke, every pulse of activity leaves behind a signature—a ghost in the machine waiting to be traced, burned, or sold to the highest bidder. The corpos, the feds, the black-market mercs—they've got eyes everywhere, crawling the grid for weak links and sloppy runners who think they’re untouchable. But there’s a way to play smarter. A way to move unseen, strike hard, and leave nothing but static in your wake. This is the protocol. Follow it, and you stay free. Slip up, and you’ll be bagged before you even smell the ICE creeping up your spine.

Everything starts with your rig. Your deck is your weapon, your armor, and your greatest liability all in one. Stock machines? Forget it. Anything straight off the shelf is a walking snitch, packed with hidden telemetry, factory backdoors, and embedded trackers waiting for a ping to light you up like a Christmas tree. You build your own, or you take an old frame and gut it like a corpo suit who got too close to the underbelly of the Net. Custom BIOS, stripped-down OS, no corporate bloatware feeding intel back to some megacorp data vault. You run your own firmware, your own firewalls, hardened and compartmentalized like a high-security vault with no master key.

Air-gapped systems are your best friends when the payload is too hot to risk exposure. Nothing touches the open Net unless it’s been scrubbed, packed, and encrypted beyond recognition. Every signal, every packet—wrapped in so many layers of obfuscation that even if some corpo tracer manages to dig up a fragment, they’ll be chasing ghosts through a labyrinth of dead ends and burner nodes. Speaking of encryption, if you’re not wrapping your comms in end-to-end ciphers, you might as well be screaming your plans in the middle of a corpo boardroom. AES, PGP, onion-routed traffic—you stack protocols like armor, because one isn’t enough. VPNs alone are a joke unless you’re daisy-chaining them through multiple jurisdictions, bouncing signals through machines that don’t even exist on paper. Tor’s good, but only if you’re layering it with other obfuscation tools. No DNS leaks, no plaintext requests, no default configs. And for the love of the Net, never send anything without padding your traffic. A sudden burst of encrypted data screams “sensitive” to anyone watching the pipes. You keep it constant, you keep it random, and you make sure nothing stands out.

Metadata is the real hunter-killer in the Net. It’s not just about what you send; it’s when, how, and to whom. You think your messages are safe because they’re encrypted? Doesn’t matter if your traffic patterns give you away. You change your timing, randomize your sessions, stagger your communication methods. One-time pads, burner accounts, ephemeral messaging—your data trail should be so fragmented that even if someone manages to piece together a part of it, they’re still years away from the full picture.

The Net is only half the equation. The other half is your physical footprint, and if you’re not covering your tracks in meatspace, you’re already compromised. Your devices betray you the second you step outside. Phones? They’re tracking nodes. Even if GPS is off, your cell tower pings, your Wi-Fi probes, your Bluetooth emissions—everything’s a silent scream broadcasting your presence. You don’t just turn off your phone. You kill it. Better yet, you don’t carry one unless it’s a burner with randomized IMEIs, disposable SIMs, and a habit of never being used in the same location twice.

Your movements are data points waiting to be exploited. CCTV, facial recognition, gait analysis—every system is designed to track anomalies. If you walk the same route twice, if you visit the same haunts, if you establish a pattern, someone will find it. You keep moving, keep switching up your approach. Blend in, look unremarkable, change your pace, your posture, your clothing. The best disguise isn’t some elaborate getup—it’s looking so forgettable that no one remembers you were ever there. If you’re running IRL gigs, you might want to grab one of those cyberpunk-looking helmets they sell on TikTok and AliExpress, or even a simple face shield. Not just for the aesthetic—those things mess with facial recognition algorithms, throwing off the AI that’s crawling through every city surveillance feed. Pair it with a hoodie, a high collar, and you’re just another ghost in the sprawl.

Cameras are everywhere, but they aren’t invincible. Weird, bright-colored swirly patterns, known as adversarial fashion or camouflage against AI, are designed specifically to throw off machine vision. They make AI image recognition struggle to categorize or identify people wearing them. Some use hyperface patterns—graphic overlays designed to confuse facial recognition by flooding the system with false positives, making it see faces where there aren’t any. Infrared-blocking glasses stop biometric tracking cold, leaving you invisible to security cams trying to map your face. Some high-end runners even pack small IR floodlights that are invisible to the human eye but blind cameras completely. The corpos built these systems to watch, but they didn’t build them perfectly. Use their blind spots against them.

Corpo credits, digital transactions, biometric payments? They’re just data chains linking you to a real identity. If you need to make a purchase, it’s untraceable or it doesn’t happen. Cash still talks in the undercity. Unregistered crypto, properly laundered through mixers, tumblers, and darknet exchanges, is your fallback when cash isn’t an option. Anything with a transaction history is a liability. You don’t let that history lead back to you.

The best netrunners never get caught because they never existed in the first place. But if the corps ever get close, if the tracers are sniffing too hard, you don’t hesitate—you burn it all. Wipe your drives with zero-pass overwrites, then physically destroy them. Crypto keys? Gone. Logs? Gone. Anything that could tie back to you? Reduced to digital dust. You never keep a device longer than it’s useful. The moment it’s at risk, it’s scrapped, melted, or dumped in a place where no scanner will ever find it.

And if you have to disappear completely? You were never here to begin with. Your aliases vanish. Your safehouses go dark. You switch cities, switch names, switch entire identities. The best runners have backups for their backups—a new face waiting in the wings, a fresh set of credentials prepped and ready for the next phase. You don’t wait for the net to close around you; you slip through the cracks before anyone realizes you were even in the system.

Paranoia isn’t a weakness. It’s what keeps you alive. Every connection is a risk, every action a potential exposure. You assume you’re always being watched, always being tracked, and you act accordingly. The ones who get caught? They got careless. They got comfortable. They thought they were untouchable. The grid is always listening, always watching, always waiting for that one mistake that gives it all away.

You don’t make mistakes. You don’t leave trails. You don’t exist.

And that’s why you survive.