FBI Would Have Paid For College Attack On Tor

The FBI would have last year an American university paid $ 1 million for attacking Tor users in order to find people that they could accuse of crimes, reports the Tor Project, the organization that maintains the Tor network.

Every day, 2.5 million people use the Tor network to protect their IP addresses and online privacy. In July last year there were several Tor servers discovered that had been put down to identify Tor users. Eventually, it turned to a study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University. According to the Tor Project were likely to be a dragnet that investigators throw out, to gather as much information about users which could then be used by the FBI.

In addition, the action was aimed not only against criminal users of the Tor network, but for all users. "This attack exceeds the critical line between research and endangerment of users," said Roger Dingledine, co-developer of Tor. He argues that the attack also sets a precedent where civil liberties are under attack by law enforcement agencies that outsource their police work in universities.

"As such an FBI-attack is accepted via a university proxy, no one has on the Internet, the protection of the amendment and 4th runs anyone risk." Dingledine argues that investigative agencies Tor can use for their police work, but that police investigation is not complete violation of people justifying their privacy and certainly not as legitimate research 'can be labeled. The vulnerability that the researchers used was already addressed last year. In addition, the Tor Project has a number of rules for ethical research published to the Tor network.

Wired approached the university, who denied the allegations, but said that there was a lack of evidence. "I would like to see a substantiation of their claim," said a PR staff. "I'm not familiar with any payment," as he announced. The employee declined to comment further.

Provider Mobile Spyware Hacked, Customer Data Leaked

Attackers have managed at a popular provider of mobile spyware to break into and subsequently stolen and put online database with customer data. The software in question is mSpy that own words almost 2 million users have.

According to the attackers in the hack, which is unknown how that occurred, captured the data of more than 400,000 people.IT journalist Brian Krebs , however, that the actual number of customers affected can not be determined. However, concerns sensitive information such as emails, text messages, pay and location data, passwords, Apple ID, photos and calendar data.In total, there were hundreds of gigabytes of data stolen.

Through mSpy users can use the phone a different monitors, such as incoming and outgoing calls, text messages, emails, GPS location, chat conversations, Internet and can access the address book and calendar are obtained. For this purpose it is required that the user has physical access to the device of the other, so that the mSpy can be installed. The software itself has not yet responded to the burglary.

New Video Shows Importance Of Tor Anonymous Internet

The developers of the Tor anonymizing network together with a development studio a short animated video created that shows the importance of the Internet Gate and anonymous. Through the Tor network Internet users can protect their IP address and example visit censored websites.

According to the video walk Internet users in the use of a normal browser is a risk that they are all leak personal information without that they see this immediately. Tor, however, would protect users' privacy and identity. "Tor protects your connection with three encryption layers and let it through three managed servers run by volunteers around the world. This allows us to communicate anonymously on the Internet."

Because Tor users look exactly the same, it is difficult for parties that monitors to identify users, which provides anonymity.The more people use Tor, the stronger the network, since it is easier to hide in a group of people who look the same, according to the video. In addition, Internet activists and bloggers help repressive regimes by also using Tor or run a Tor server.

Almost 97% Of Tor Traffic Goes To 'Normal' Websites

Almost 97% of the traffic that will generate Tor users to 'normal' websites over the internet anyone can visit, according to research from the Tor Project. Tor is a software that allows users not only to hide their IP address, but also makes it possible to visit Tor sites that are only accessible through the Tor network.These are the so-called "hidden services".

The Tor Project wanted to know how many of the Tor traffic goes to these hidden services. For this was the collaboration of several volunteers to share data from their Tor server. This enabled the Tor Project a small proportion (2% - 5%) of activities in hidden view services. Establish on the basis of current calculations, the researchers found that each day 30,000 hidden services are active. These websites generate every day 400 to 600Mbit per second of traffic, which amounts to about 5 terabytes of data per day.

Furthermore, it appears that is the Tor traffic from Tor users to these hidden services 3.4% of the total Tor traffic. This means that 96.6% of the Tor traffic to "normal" websites is that anyone can access through a browser. Tor came last year regularly negative in the news because Tor would mainly be used for visiting criminal Tor sites. Now it appears that the most traffic to websites is that outside Gate to visit.

The researchers suggest that it is still to preliminary results in that regard are established on the basis of a limited data set, and with a grain would have to be taken. The study was conducted over a period of several months, but the researchers plan to expand further in the future. They want to know how many people visit daily Tor sites and how often people try to visit a hidden service that no longer exists.

"Unfortunately, some of these questions with the current reporting infrastructure are not easy to answer, mostly because the collection in this way can reveal hidden information about specific services, as well as the results of the current system include excess  dates." The researchers are also looking at aggregation protocols for statistics that they can use in place of the current system, so they still safe to collect all kinds of statistics.