Drug Case In Ireland Has Fingerprints of Carnegie Mellon's Attack On Tor

blottsie writes: Newly released evidence shows that Irish detectives who worked the case of two convicted drug dealers may have also used data obtained through CMU's Software Engineering Institute's methods. Mannion and O'Connor were arrested on Nov. 5, 2014, according to a database of Dark Net arrests created by independent researcher Gwern Branwen. That's the same day that the owner of Silk Road 2.0, the replacement for the infamous drug marketplace Silk Road, was arrested. The IP addresses of Silk Road 2.0 were provided to the FBI by a "source of information," according to a search warrant in another case impacted by the attack on Tor, which court documents later confirmed was a university-based research institute.

Comments

Re: Good for CMU.

[PopeRatzo]

Libertarianism doesn't require faith in that.

Libertarianism always starts with "if only". As in, "If only people were different, people would be different."

and is quite demonstrable

The part that's demonstrable is that those that act only for their own good will inevitably take advantage of those who work in the good of the commons, and eventually will poison the well. There is a reason greed has been considered a human failing, at least until the relatively recent development of libertarianism. Let's be honest: libertarianism only exists to provide a moral/social/political framework to give cover to sociopaths. Not that all libertarians are sociopaths. I don't believe that at all. But all libertarians are useful to the sociopaths.

So, where to now?

[RuffMasterD]

Looks like this genie is out of the bottle, and the temptation will simply be too great for law enforcement to let it back in. Tor is compromised. What can we do now? Can Tor be improved to mitigate such attacks, or to warn users in real time that an attack is happening? Are there alternative systems that are not known to have been compromised yet?