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Cybercrooks Increasingly Use Tor Network To Control Botnets
alphadogg writes "Malware writers are increasingly considering the Tor anonymity network as an option for hiding the real location of their command-and-control servers, according to researchers from security firm ESET. The researchers recently came across two botnet-type malware programs that use C&C servers operating as Tor 'hidden services.' The Tor Hidden Service protocol allows users to set up services — usually Web servers — that can only be accessed from within the Tor network through a random-looking hostname that ends in the .onion pseudo domain extension. The traffic between a Tor client and a Tor hidden service is encrypted and is randomly routed through a series of computers participating in the network and acting as relays."
In other news, bank robbers are increasingly wearing masks.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
No need... Cheap server hosting with little tracking was plentiful. Now, not so much... You see, as they develop new methods, lots of people study and find ways to defeat those methods. So in a small ammount of time, there will be many hackers finding a way to shatter annonomity in TOR. The NSA could not have planned it better.
Of course, you shouldn't blame Tor for this. I'm sure Freenet could equally be used, but Tor is just easy. Instead, blame the OS manufactures, and the owners of the bot-ridden machines. Seriously. It's your fault if you don't know enough about your car that you ignore the oil light and it seizes up on a highway. And it's your fault if your machine is turned into a cog of part of a greater machine, bending to the whims of some "hacker".
Maybe it's time to bring back computers with the OS stored in ROM, so that is is reset to a clean state every time the computer is restarted.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
As if the powers-that-be weren't already looking for excuses to criminalize Tor, shut it down, and arrest people involved with it, now it's a certainty. Between overtly oppresive governments wishing to further tighten their grip on their citizens, and the U.S. and other Western countries wanting to destroy every notion of privacy for it's citizens and spying on everyone, this is just the excuse they all need to start black-bagging Tor operators and users. Thanks so much, assholes, for further ruining the world for everyone.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Anonymity is a powerful force. In both directions. The anonymous writings of the late 18th century were every bit as powerful as a masked bandit.
I, for one, do not consider the risk of Tor to be greater than the benefit.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Its pretty easy to take away the anonymity of tor if you could hypothetically record all traffic to and from each computer in the network. You can then see Alice send the message to Carlos who then forwarded it to Bob. Luckily in the US no one is recording every encrypted message you send... oh shit.
The only way to protect yourself would to use garlic routing and make sure you send a lot of traffic. Turn your bandwidth up. To improve this, you need to create a widely used sharing client for your network to get as many others to create decoy traffic as you can.
I have a suggestion instead. Build a tor like tool but mandate personal key exchange between known parties. This would strengthen the security of the service, and it would be possible to segment bad actors from people seeking true anonymity. If I welcome job drug dealer to my networks (say by monitoring edge transactions) I may decide to pull my permission for some key's nodes to connect to mine. Problems solved and we can burn out the pedo's, criminals, and all those nasty folks who's agenda's I disagree with.
Bye!
Its pretty easy to take away the anonymity of tor if you could hypothetically record all traffic to and from each computer in the network. You can then see Alice send the message to Carlos who then forwarded it to Bob. Luckily in the US no one is recording every encrypted message you send... oh shit.
Next time you are on TOR look and see where your exit node is. Surprisingly often is it Virginia... Hmm... Is my tinfoil hat on tight?
Then the US government better stop being the source of 80% of the project's funding.
I wondered why browsing over Tor had been getting so much faster lately. I guess these guys have at least some of their slaves set up as relays, in effect adding capacity to the network. Honestly not sure if I'm joking though because it almost makes sense.
The article found two examples of using Tor, and had already identified one from the past. That's the justification for the "increasingly using Tor" headline? Then again, I'm surprised that they didn't run with a headline of "Malware using Tor Doubled!"
"Its pretty easy to take away the anonymity of tor if you could hypothetically record all traffic to and from each computer in the network. "
Tor was specifically designed to prevent exactly that.
The vulnerability of Tor is in its exit nodes (where Tor routing ends, and regular internet routing resumes). A third party can snarf all the traffic through an exit router, and (if that traffic is from one person), they might as well have a tap at that person's ISP.
The difficulty, of course, is that there is no way to tell in advance via which exit router your traffic will exit. So the government's scheme is to monitor as many exit nodes as possible.
There are two ways to make this more difficult for them: hiding and switching.
Hiding means increasing the number of Tor exit nodes (preferably vastly increasing it), as well as turning them on and off at random times (I don't mean every few minutes, but more like in blocks of 4-8 hours or so). This makes it more difficult to track traffic through any given exit node. Note, however, that in order for Tor to work effectively while turning nodes on and off like that, it would definitely need many more exit nodes. Hell, it needs lots more anyway.
By "switching", I mean sending all your HTTP requests via multiple connections through different Tor routes. Because of the wait times to re-align packets, this is not necessarily significantly faster over Tor (as it is when using multiple connections for downloads, as some browsers do), but that is possible. It would mean that only some of your packets are exiting via any given Tor exit node, making tracing your activities much harder.
Tor isn't closed source.
The more pertinent issue is that Tor exit nodes are under no obligations to allow certain types of traffic to exit. So it's perfectly possible to block known malware data. Though not much you could do about Tor running as the malware, but in that regard scanning for unintended Tor processes would be a pretty good red flag.
Nope it was the U.S. Naval Research Lab that was the original sponsor. Also as of 2012, 80% of their funding was still from the U.S. government.
Isn't it kind of obvious that if you build something designed to try to make you anonymous that people will try to use that anonymity for shady reasons?
I'm not saying we shouldn't have anonymous data, but I don't think this observation is exactly new -- I've always assumed this was the case with Tor.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
mine has never popped up in Virginia, it usually pops out in some eastern block country when i use it or japan a couple of time in California.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The main use of TOR seems to be buying drugs. Clearly he's a drug-dealer terrorist pedo! And a hacker.
Back when /. was young and dinosaurs walked the earth, some pundit predicted the "four horsemen of the internet apocalypse": terrorists, pedos, drug dealers, and hackers. Every freedom the internet provided would be removed over time because for each freedom the public could be sufficiently scared by one of the four horsemen.
Sadly that was overly optimistic, having underestimated the power of the copyright lobby.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The vulnerability of Tor is in its exit nodes
This is true only if you intended target is on the regular internet and not within Tor itself. The article speaks to hidden services within Tor so exit nodes don't even come into play.
There are plenty of hidden services inside the Tor network that are far worse than botnet C&Cs and those have been going on for years now. Methinks if there was a way to shutdown bad stuff on Tor, you'd have already heard about it.