anonymity | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A Dutch court on Tuesday sentenced one of the co-founders of the now-sanctioned Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer service to 5 years and 4 months in prison. While the name of the defendant was  redacted in the verdict , it's known that Alexey Pertsev, a 31-year-old Russian national, had been  awaiting trial  in the Netherlands on money laundering charges. Pertsev, one of the developers of Tornado Cash, was  arrested  in Amsterdam in August 2022 days after the U.S. Treasury Department  sanctioned  the service for allowing malicious actors such as the Lazarus Group to launder and cash out their proceeds. In addition to the imprisonment, the defendant is expected to forfeit cryptocurrency assets worth €1.9 million (~$2.05 million) and a Porsche car that had been previously seized. "The defendant declared that it was never his intention to break the law or to facilitate criminal activities," a su...

A botnet previously considered to be rendered inert has been observed enslaving end-of-life (EoL) small home/small office (SOHO) routers and IoT devices to fuel a criminal proxy service called Faceless. " TheMoon , which  emerged  in  2014 , has been operating quietly while growing to over 40,000 bots from 88 countries in January and February of 2024," the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies  said . Faceless,  detailed  by security journalist Brian Krebs in April 2023, is a malicious residential proxy service that's offered its anonymity services to other threat actors for a negligible fee that costs less than a dollar per day. In doing so, it allows the customers to route their malicious traffic through tens of thousands of compromised systems advertised on the service, effectively concealing their true origins. The Faceless-backed infrastructure has been assessed to be used by operators of malware such as  SolarMarker  and  Ic...

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End-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app Signal said it's piloting a new feature that allows users to create unique usernames (not to be confused with profile names) and keep the phone numbers away from prying eyes. "If you use Signal, your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone you chat with by default," Signal's Randall Sarafa  said . "People who have your number saved in their phone's contacts will still see your phone number since they already know it." Setting a new username requires account holders to provide two or more numbers at the end of it (e.g., axolotl.99) in an effort to keep them "egalitarian and minimize spoofing." Usernames can be changed any number of times, but it's worth noting that they are not logins or handles. Put differently, a username is an anonymous way to initiate conversations on the chat platform without having to share phone numbers. The feature is opt-in, although Signal said it's also taking steps to hide by default users' phone ...

Meta-owned WhatsApp is officially rolling out a  new privacy feature  in its messaging service called "Protect IP Address in Calls" that masks users' IP addresses to other parties by relaying the calls through its servers. "Calls are end-to-end encrypted, so even if a call is relayed through WhatsApp servers, WhatsApp cannot listen to your calls," the company said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. The core idea is to make it harder for bad actors in the call to infer a user's location by securely relaying the connection through WhatsApp servers. However, a tradeoff to enabling the privacy option is a slight dip in call quality. Viewed in that light, it's akin to Apple's  iCloud Private Relay , which adds an anonymity layer by  routing users' Safari browsing sessions  through two secure internet relays. It's worth noting that the "Protect IP Address in Calls" feature has been under development since at least late Augu...

A coalition of law enforcement agencies across Europe and the U.S.  announced  the takedown of ChipMixer, an unlicensed cryptocurrency mixer that began its operations in August 2017. "The ChipMixer software blocked the blockchain trail of the funds, making it attractive for cybercriminals looking to launder illegal proceeds from criminal activities such as drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, ransomware attacks, and payment card fraud," Europol  said  in a statement. The coordinated exercise, besides dismantling the clearnet and dark web websites associated with ChipMixer, also resulted in the seizure of $47.5 million in Bitcoin and 7 TB of data. Mixers, also called tumblers,  offer full anonymity  for a fee by commingling cryptocurrency from different users – both legitimate and criminally-derived funds – in a manner that makes it hard to trace the origins. This is achieved by funneling different payments into a single pool before splitting up each ...

A group of academics from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has warned of a novel technique that could be used to defeat  anonymity protections  and identify a unique website visitor. "An attacker who has complete or partial control over a website can learn whether a specific target (i.e., a unique individual) is browsing the website," the researchers  said . "The attacker knows this target only through a public identifier, such as an email address or a Twitter handle." The cache-based targeted  de-anonymization attack  is a  cross-site leak  that involves the adversary leveraging a service such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or YouTube to privately share a resource (e.g., image, video, or a YouTube playlist) with the target, followed by embedding the shared resource into the attack website. This can be achieved by, say, privately sharing the resource with the target using the victim's email address or the appropriate username associated wit...

We have been hearing a lot about Rule 41 after the US Department of Justice has pushed an update to the rule. The change to the Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure grants the FBI much greater powers to hack legally into any computer across the country, and perhaps anywhere in the world, with just a single search warrant authorized by any US judge. However, both civil liberties groups and tech companies have blasted the proposed change, saying it is an affront to the Fourth Amendment and would allow the cops and Feds in America to hack remotely into people's computers and phones around the world. Google, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Demand Progress, FightForTheFuture, TOR (The Onion Router), Private Internet Access and other VPN providers have joined their hands to block changes to Rule 41. " The U.S. government wants to use an obscure procedure—amending a federal rule known as Rule 41— to radically expand their authority to hack," the ...

The administrator of the popular Darknet email service , SIGAINT , is warning its users that the email service has become a target of a suspected law enforcement agency who tried to compromise it. About a week ago, SIGAINT has been targeted by an attacker who tried to hack the service by using nearly 70 bad Tor exit nodes , one of the service's administrator informed its users via the tor-talk mailing list on Thursday. Before jumping on the news, Let's first understand what are Exit Nodes? As I said, SIGAINT uses TOR anonymization network which means when an email sent from one user to any destination, the email routed through multiple relays/nodes that actually aren't aware of the sender's identity. The last machine that processes the email known as a Tor exit relay or Tor exit node. The end user who receives that email can see the IP of the exit node instead of the IP address of the original sender. And this is how, SIGAINT allows you to send ...

Are you aware of everything that your users are accessing from your environment? While most of the time, non-work-related Internet browsing is harmless (looking at pictures of cats, online shopping, social media, etc.) there are some instances where you could be an unknowing and unwilling participant in criminal activity. That is, when users hide that activity via the Tor network , or the Dark Net . The Onion Router , better known as " Tor ", an open source project, launched in 2002, is designed to allow a user to browse the Internet anonymously via a volunteer network of more than 5000 relays. It doesn't share your identifying information like your IP address and physical location with websites or service providers. A user that navigate Internet using Tor , it's quite difficult to trace its activities ensuring his online privacy. There are arguably legitimate uses for this technology, such as providing Internet access in repressively regulated countri...

Tor has always been a tough target for law enforcement for years and FBI has spent millions of dollars to de-anonymize the identity of Tor users, but a latest research suggests that more than 81% of Tor clients can be "de-anonymised" by exploiting the traffic analysis software 'Netflow' technology that Cisco has built into its router protocols. NetFlow is a network protocol designed to collect and monitor network traffic. It exchanged data in network flows, which can correspond to TCP connections or other IP packets sharing common characteristics, such UDP packets sharing source and destination IP addresses, port numbers, and other information. The research was conducted for six years by professor Sambuddho Chakravarty , a former researcher at Columbia University's Network Security Lab and now researching Network Anonymity and Privacy at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi. Chakravarty used a technique, in order to determine the Tor...

The Russian government is offering almost 4 million ruble which is approximately equal to $111,000 to the one who can devise a reliable technology to decrypt data sent over the Tor , an encrypted anonymizing network used by online users in order to hide their activities from law enforcement, government censors, and others. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) issued a notice on its official procurement website, originally posted on July 11, under the title " шифр «ТОР (Флот)» " ;which translates as " cipher 'TOR' (Navy) " an open call for Tor-cracking proposals whose winner will be chosen by August 20. The MIA specifically wants researchers to " study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users and users' equipment on the Tor anonymous network, " according to a translated version of the Russian government's proposal. Only Russian nationals and companies are allowed to take part in the competition " in o...

The spy agencies' activities have gone on for more than a decade. Now we have enough details about how the NSA eavesdrops on the internet, another explosive news has emerged yesterday from the Snowden files that NSA has the ability to decrypt most of anything that is on the internet. They have done this not through cracking encryption mathematically, but by secretly using influence and billions of dollars to insert backdoors designed to preserve their ability to eavesdrop.  Also the majority of devices connected to the Tor anonymity network may be using encryption keys that can be broken by the National Security Agency, according to Rob Graham, CEO of penetration testing firm Errata Security. The ability to crack high-level encryption is something that has been a pretty significant legend in the infosec community. Graham arrived at that conclusion after analyzing nearly 23,000 Tor connections through an exit node that Graham controls and about 76 perc...

Recent disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden claiming that internet traffic is being intercepted and used by the Americans in their war on terror, force to re-think about the user's privacy and online anonymity. It has been relatively common knowledge for years that wherever we go on the web, we leave clear tracks, so it shouldn't really have come as much of a surprise to discover this has been going on. The best thing you can do to stay anonymous online is to hide your IP address . If someone knows your IP address, it is the easiest way to trace your online activity back to you and they can easily determine the geographic location of the server that hosts that address and get a rough idea of where you're located. TOR is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Browsing with TOR is a lot like simultaneously using hundreds of different proxies that are randomized periodically. ...

Tor has become a tool of free expression in parts of the world where citizens can not speak freely against their government. On Tuesday, a number of users have noticed that Facebook is blocking connections from the Tor network. Tor is a free tool that keeps Web browsing sessions private and anonymous . For activists and political dissidents who use the Internet to communicate with the outside world in countries where doing so is a crime , being unable to login to Facebook using TOR posed a huge problem. Later, Facebook resolves the Tor issues and said that A high volume of malicious activity across Tor exit nodes triggered Facebook's automated malware detection system, which temporarily blocked visitors who use the Tor anonymity service to access the social network . The role that Tor and Facebook played in facilitating the dissemination of information under restrictive regimes cannot be underestimated. Security researchers are also frequent users of Tor, f...