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TOR’s Anonymity Promise Slashed- Users can be Tracked with their Mouse Movements! TOR is used by probably millions of Internet users simply because it keeps their identities hidden and protected from potential exploiters. However, Tor browser has been receiving criticism by several security researchers regarding various vulnerabilities that may expose the identity of the user. Now, […]
Short Bytes: While TOR software suite promises enhanced privacy and security, researchers have found new ways like TOR user fingerprinting to unmask the users. One such I.T. security expert has listed some advanced TOR user fingerprinting methods that exploit a user’s mouse movements and certain JavaScript functions. TOR browser is used by hundreds of thousands […]
A security researcher has devised a new technique to track users by analyzing the mouse movements, even when surfing on the Tor network. While we surf on the Internet we leave an impressive amount of traces that could be used to track our profile and also reveal our identity even we are visiting resources in the darknet. The […]
What’s driving the surge in hidden services—is it government tampering? In recent weeks, the number of “hidden services”—usually Web servers and other Internet services accessible by a “.onion” address on the Tor anonymizing network—has risen dramatically. After experiencing an earlier spike in February, the number of hidden services tracked by Tor spiked to 114,000 onion addresses […]
‘Sybil’ nodes could be used to de-anonymise traffic. The Tor Project is working with Princeton University boffins to try and identify possibly malicious nodes, and prevent them from harvesting traffic by gaming its node reputation system. Tor’s reputation services collect flags from relays, from which they assess and publish (hourly) the reputation of relays, but the […]
A judge has confirmed that US Departement of Defense funded the Carnegie Mellon University to conduct research on the Tor hacking. In November 2015, the researchers at the Tor Project publicly accused the FBI of paying the experts at the Carnegie Mellon University to deanonymize Tor users. The experts at the Tor Project collected information about the […]
Ricochet is the most secure encrypted anonymous messenger that sends no metadata. The security experts have approved a new internet messaging tool that bypasses the federal government’s metadata collection system to help human rights activists and journalists protect whistleblowers. Called the Ricochet, this software has been in development for around two years. However, following a […]
Some Tor servers may leak timezone info via gzipped files. Jose Carlos Norte, developer for the eyeOS virtual desktop project, has discovered an obscure setting in the HTTP GZIP compression format that may help authorities identify the timezone and general location of a Tor-based server. A long time ago, Web servers started supporting the compression of […]
Tor Project patches critical bug but refuses to acknowledge the bug discovery by a security researcher. Tor Project’s website had a critical cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability which if exploited by a potential hacker, could have put thousands of visitors to the blog at risk. The vulnerability was discovered by an independent cyber security researcher Roy Jansen. Roy, […]
Default Settings In Apache Servers Can Leak Details about Tor traffic. This has happened the second time in this week. Leaving default setting open after the product has been released can cause serious problems for the product users. Earlier we had MediaTek leaving a debug tool meant for developers open after shipping which could let potential […]
Short Bytes: Tor Browser 5.5 is the first stable release in the 5.5 series of Tor. It is released for all the supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It is now available for download from the Tor Browser Project page along with many new features. The recent Tor Browser 5.5 release […]
Short Bytes: Using the publicly available data, data visualization software firm Uncharted has prepared TorFlow — a map for visualizing how TOR’s data looks as it flows all across the world. It shows TOR network’s node and data movements based on the IP addresses of relays bouncing around the connections of users to avoid spying. TOR […]
Back in 2013, the FBI seized TorMail, one of the most popular dark web email services, and shortly after started to rifle through the server’s contents. At the time, researchers suspected the agency had also deployed a network investigative technique (NIT)—the FBI’s term for a hacking tool—to infect users of the site. Now, confirmation of […]
Short Bytes: If you are interested in increasing the security and privacy of your network traffic, here’s a great news for you. Facebook has just rolled out experimental TOR support for its Android app. Well, Facebook still needs your real name and information — how is that a way to stay anonymous? These are the […]
THE SO-CALLED DARK web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it’s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica. On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major […]
Short Bytes: Last year, the FBI engaged in the largest ever law enforcement hacking campaign to shut down “the largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the world.” The FBI made use of a hacking tool called network investigative technique (NIT) to sniff the IP addresses of the pedophile users and busted them. Back […]
Short Bytes: Being Anonymous online is the need of the hour, and TOR browser does that job quite efficiently and honestly. But there are some things that you need to keep in mind so that you don’t blow your anonymity cover while using the TOR network. The internet is awe-inspiring, but it has its nightmares for […]
IT’S BEEN MORE than 30 years since David Chaum launched the ideas that would serve as much of the groundwork for anonymity online. In doing so, he also helped spark the debate that’s endured ever since, over the anarchic freedoms that digital secrecy enables—the conflict between privacy advocates and governments known today as the “crypto […]
The Tor officially announced to launch the Tor Bug Bounty Program in the next year, a great news for the Tor community. The non-profit organization that is maintaining the TOR project plans to launch very soon a Tor Bug Bounty Program for researchers who find vulnerabilities in the popular anonymizing platform. This is a great for all the […]
Image: fossBytes Short Bytes: A Tails live-USB is like a security-focused computer in a tiny box. Edward Snowden used the same OS for keeping his communications out of the prying eyes of NSA. The development team behind this security-focused OS has just announced the release of Tails 1.8 with new features. While talking about a […]
Researchers are still looking for a Tor alternative.Scientists at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created an anonymous messaging system, in the same category as Tor, I2P, and HORNET, which takes a different approach to relaying messages between two parties. The system, dubbed Vuvuzela after the infamous plastic horn used at […]