Tor project

How Tor Is Building A New Dark Net With Help From The U.S. Military

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Flashback:

– Peeling The Onion: Almost Everyone Involved In Developing Tor Was (Or Is) Funded By The US Government

 

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– How Tor is building a new Dark Net with help from the U.S. military (The Daily Dot, April 20, 2015):

The Dark Net is under attack.

Actually, it’s always under attack. That’s the smart attitude to take as the spotlight has been turned up on technology like the Tor-anonymizing network. Threats from governments and hackers around the world have pushed Tor’s decade-old hidden service technology to its limits.

To stay ahead in the security race, Tor is building the next-generation Dark Net in part with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. military agency charged with inventing the cutting edge of new technology.

Read moreHow Tor Is Building A New Dark Net With Help From The U.S. Military

Microsoft’s Secret Battle Against The Tor Botnet – Microsoft Can ‘Remotely Remove Progams En Masse From People’s Computers’

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– Microsoft’s secret battle against the Tor botnet (The Daily Dot, Jan 16, 2014):

In August 2013, 4 million infected computers woke up and waited instructions from their master.

The pathogen was Sefnit, a nasty bit of malware that makes infected computers mine bitcoins. Once the computers woke up, they worked under the command of Ukranian and Israeli hackers named Scorpion and Dekadent. The malware communicated with the two by downloading Tor, the powerful anonymizing software, and talking over encrypted channels. It was the first time a botnet, as a collection of slave computers is called, used Tor in such a potentially powerful way.

By using an unconventional method to exploit Windows, the hackers unwittingly forced Microsoft to show a hand few knew it had: The ability to remotely remove progams en masse from people’s computers, without them even knowing it.

Read moreMicrosoft’s Secret Battle Against The Tor Botnet – Microsoft Can ‘Remotely Remove Progams En Masse From People’s Computers’

FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

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– FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack (Wired, Sep 13, 2013):

It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors.

Freedom Hosting’s operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It’s not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control.

Read moreFBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

Rogue SSL Certificates Issued For CIA, MI6, Mossad

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– Rogue SSL certs were also issued for CIA, MI6, Mossad (Help Net Security):

The number of rogue SSL certificates issued by Dutch CA DigiNotar has balooned from one to a couple dozen to over 250 to 531 in just a few days.As Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor project shared the full list of the rogue certificates, it became clear that fraudulent certificates for domains of a number of intelligence agencies from around the world were also issued during the CA’s compromise – including the CIA, MI6 and Mossad.

Additional targeted domains include Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Skype, Twitter, Tor, WordPress and many others.

He received the list from sources in the Dutch Government, which has retracted its statement about trusting DigiNotar’s PKIoverheid CA branch, announced to its citizens that it cannot guarantee the security of its own websites, and taken over DigiNotar’s operations and immediately organized audits of its infrastructure.

Read moreRogue SSL Certificates Issued For CIA, MI6, Mossad