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Researchers Discover Over 100 Tor Nodes Designed To Spy On Hidden Services (schneier.com)
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.
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.
What does that make them?
Attackers?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
When an encryption method ia broken, normally there is a newer stronger and more secure method recommended. The flaws in Tor are hardly news now but still there is no viable and usable alternative.
Any attempts to be anonymous or simply not be tracked and recorded in the databases of multinationals and so on is a lot of hard work these days of turning off and opting out and disabling things.
Is there nothing better on the way? Is a dubious and untrustworthy Tor connection the last refuge of online anonymity?
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.
In this day and age, it seems anyone who either uses Tor or operates an exit node is opening themselves to crazy risks. Especially the exit node operators. With the kind of traffic going through some of them you have to be a moron to run one...
For no reason and not remotely connected to the topic.
Typical Slashcrap behavior.
When in doubt, time to go old school. War driving for wifi, do your hacking then drive off.
The "honions' ".
Jesus...
If you've got nothing to hide, you're a useless idiot.
I'll bet at least some of these are NSA and other governments (China etc)
Why not this:
Two security researchers setup 100 honeypot tor nodes to catch... two security researchers using 100 tor nodes to spy on traffic.
I guess I don't understand the difference in level of effort between these two activities and why one must be a government run hacking expedition while the other is two dudes in a lab.
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!
Do you REALLY believe that the NSA, the CIA, the FBI all have zero interest in finding out who's using TOR and for what?
I wonder if it would be possible to set up a series of these honeypots in order to detect potentially-malicious activity and craft a database of nodes "promoting" malicious activity. Using that data, shape Tor traffic to avoid malicious nodes in the network. Adopting the traffic-shaping would be voluntary, ascentral control over routing is dangerous, and the body operating the "checkpoints" could act transparently.
Not sure if the Tor protocol allows for it; this is just back-of-the-napkin thinking, but it would create a more robust, likely more secure, network.