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Researchers Discover Over 100 Tor Nodes Designed To Spy On Hidden Services (schneier.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the lurking-in-the-shadows dept.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Schneier on Security: Two researchers have discovered over 100 Tor nodes that are spying on hidden services. Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing reports: "These nodes -- ordinary nodes, not exit nodes -- sorted through all the traffic that passed through them, looking for anything bound for a hidden service, which allowed them to discover hidden services that had not been advertised. These nodes then attacked the hidden services by making connections to them and trying common exploits against the server-software running on them, seeking to compromise and take them over. The researchers used 'honeypot' .onion servers to find the spying computers: these honeypots were .onion sites that the researchers set up in their own lab and then connected to repeatedly over the Tor network, thus seeding many Tor nodes with the information of the honions' existence. They didn't advertise the honions' existence in any other way and there was nothing of interest at these sites, and so when the sites logged new connections, the researchers could infer that they were being contacted by a system that had spied on one of their Tor network circuits. No one knows who is running the spying nodes: they could be run by criminals, governments, private suppliers of 'infowar' weapons to governments, independent researchers, or other scholars (though scholarly research would not normally include attempts to hack the servers once they were discovered)." The Tor project is aware of the attack and is working to redesign its system to try and block it. Security firm Bitdefender has issued an alert about a malicious app called EasyDoc that hands over control of Macs to criminals via Tor.

5 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. So much for anonymity. by shmlco · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Anyone who thinks they can hide in the darknet is an idiot.

    --
    Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
    1. Re:So much for anonymity. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Anyone who thinks they can hide in the darknet is an idiot.

      You are the idiot here. You haven't even understood what you read. Nothing in the article implies that Tor doesn't work, and no "vulnerability" was found out. It actually says that it is used also for illegal purposes, such as hacking and running giant botnets, which is no news at all and makes me think that Tor works pretty well, otherwise black-hats wouldn't use it.

  2. Re: If U don't do anything illegal by spectrum- · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe you just wish to conduct normal law abiding living with some privacy from governments which aren't democratic (Tor is a global resource don't forget) or large corporations looking to exploit any data on individuals for profit. Data has a value and quite often it's taken without users knowledge and sold onwards without giving them any say. Given how terrible some government's and companies secure your personal data from blatant criminality using your data for their gain, everybody has a vested interest in privacy even if theyre law abiding.

  3. Re:If U don't do anything illegal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you've got nothing to hide, you're a useless idiot.

  4. Easydoc? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What the everloving hell does Easydoc have to do with spying Tor nodes?

    Every time Apple's in the news, BeauHD adds an irrelevant crosspost to the most recent Apple news. Same with virtually any other topic. This isn't editorializing, this adds literally nothing of value to the story.

    Please stop the crossposting irrelevancies. Haven't you heard the old saying? If you've got nothing useful to add, add nothing!