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An unknown threat actor managed to control more than 27% of the entire Tor network exit capacity in early February 2021, a new study on the dark web infrastructure revealed. "The entity attacking Tor users is actively exploiting tor users since over a year and expanded the scale of their attacks to a new record level," an independent security researcher who goes by the name nusenu  said  in a write-up published on Sunday. "The average exit fraction this entity controlled was above 14% throughout the past 12 months." It's the latest in a series of efforts undertaken to bring to light malicious Tor activity perpetrated by the actor since  December 2019 . The attacks, which are said to have begun in January 2020, were first  documented and exposed  by the same researcher in August 2020. Tor is open-source software for enabling anonymous communication on the Internet. It obfuscates the source and destination of a web request by directing network traffic through

WannaCry , the biggest ransomware attack in the history, gained prominence very rapidly in the media globally after the ransomware infected more than 300,000 computers in over 150 countries within just 72 hours. Governments, Intelligence agencies and law enforcement around the world have already started their investigations and are working closely with affected companies to track down hackers responsible for the global cyber attack launched on Friday, 12th May. Some researchers traced back WannaCry to a state-sponsored hacking group in North Korea, while other believed the perpetrators might be Chinese . If you have been following WannaCry coverage on The Hacker News, you should be aware of that the WannaCry ransomware uses Tor hidden service to communicate with its command-and-control server. Just yesterday, we came to know that French authorities had seized at least 6 Tor's entry guard node servers, hosted on France-based hosting providers, just two days after the o

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Another blow to the Tor Project : One of the Tor Project's earliest contributors has decided to quit the project and shut down all of the important Tor nodes under his administration. Lucky Green was part of the Tor Project before the anonymity network was known as TOR. He probably ran one of the first 5 nodes in the TOR network at its inception and managed special nodes inside the anonymity network. However, Green announced last weekend that "it is no longer appropriate" for him to be part of the Tor Project, whether it is financially or by providing computing resources. TOR, also known as The Onion Router , is an anonymity network that makes use of a series of nodes and relays to mask its users' traffic and hide their identity by disguising IP addresses and origins. The TOR network is used by privacy-conscious people, activists, journalists and users from countries with strict censorship rules. Crucial and Fast TOR Nodes to be Shut Down Soon Alongs

The Tor Project has officially launched the first beta version of Tor Messenger, an open source and Encrypted instant messaging client that works on top of the Tor network. Tor Messenger is designed by keeping both simplicity and privacy in mind. The team claimed that their app encrypts the content of instant messages as well as makes it very difficult for snoopers and eavesdroppers to identify the user sending them. Tor Messenger integrates the " Off-the-Record " (OTR) to encrypt messages and then routes them over Tor network in the same manner as the Tor Browser does for the web. The app is built on Mozilla's instant messaging client Instantbird and works a lot like Adium, another popular instant messaging client. Here's How to Install Tor Messenger in your PC: Tor Messenger can be run on versions of Windows, Mac, or Linux PC. To do so, you simply have to follow these simple steps: Download Tor from here Drag the app to your Application

Back in November, Mozilla teamed-up with Tor Project under a new initiative called Polaris , in order to help reduce finite number of Tor connections occurring at the same time by adding high-capacity Tor middle relays to the Tor network , and now the company is ready with its first Tor Middle relays. The Firefox maker has given the Tor network a high-capacity middle relays with the launch of 12 relays , all located in the United States, that will help distribute user traffic; the Tor browser is a great way to keep prying eyes from tracking you. Mozilla is one of the most trusted companies on the internet, particularly when it comes to user privacy. The partnership of Mozilla and Tor aimed at providing more privacy features to Firefox browser, and increased Tor network support. The Polaris Privacy Initiative was an effort of Mozilla, the Tor Project and the Center of Democracy and Technology — an advocacy group for digital rights, in order to help build more privacy

Tor has been targeted once again, but this time at a much larger scale. A new attack on Tor network reportedly would either completely shut it down worldwide or turn it into evil network. This time Tor – an internet browser which allows people to maintain their anonymity online by protecting their location – is warning its users of a cyber attack that quietly seized some of its network specialized servers called Directory Authorities (DA) , the servers that help Tor clients to find Tor relays in the anonymous network service. Tor network architecture relies on ten Directory Authorities whose information is hardcoded into Tor clients. These directory authorities are located in the Europe and United States, and maintain the signed list of all the verified exit relays of the Tor network, and according to experts, attack on these backbone servers can "incapacitate" the overall architecture of Tor. " The Tor Project has learned that there may be an attempt to incapacit

A critical vulnerability in Tor — an encrypted anonymizing network considered to be one of the most privacy oriented service, which is used by online users in order to hide their activities from law enforcement, government censors and others — was probably being used to de-anonymize the identity of Tor users, Tor project warned on Wednesday. 115 MALICIOUS ToR RELAYS WERE DE-ANONYMIZING USERS According to a security advisory , Tor Team has found a group of 115 malicious fast non-exit relays (6.4% of whole Tor network), those were actively monitoring the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit in an effort to de-anonymize users. " While we don't know when they started doing the attack, users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they were affected, " Tor said. When you use Tor anonymizing network, your IP address remains hidden and it appears that your connection is coming from the IP address of a Tor exit rela