tor browser | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Trojanized installers for the TOR anonymity browser are being used to target users in Russia and Eastern Europe with  clipper malware  designed to siphon cryptocurrencies since September 2022. "Clipboard injectors [...] can be silent for years, show no network activity or any other signs of presence until the disastrous day when they replace a crypto wallet address," Vitaly Kamluk, director of global research and analysis team (GReAT) for APAC at Kaspersky,  said . Another notable aspect of clipper malware is that its nefarious functions are not triggered unless the clipboard data meets a specific criteria, making it more evasive. It's not immediately clear how the installers are distributed, but evidence points to the use of torrent downloads or some unknown third-party source since the Tor Project's website has been  subjected  to  blockades  in  Russia  in recent years. Regardless of the method used, the installer launches the legiti...

A popular Chinese-language YouTube channel has emerged as a means to distribute a trojanized version of a Windows installer for the Tor Browser. Kaspersky  dubbed  the campaign  OnionPoison , with all of the victims located in China. The scale of the attack remains unclear, but the Russian cybersecurity company said it detected victims appearing in its telemetry in March 2022. The malicious version of the Tor Browser installer is being distributed via a link present in the description of a video that was uploaded to YouTube on January 9, 2022. It has been viewed over 64,500 times to date. Google has moved to pull the video from the social media platform for violating YouTube's Harmful and Dangerous policies. The channel that hosted the video has 181,000 subscribers and claims to be based in Hong Kong. The attack banks on the fact that the actual Tor Browser website is blocked in China, thus tricking unsuspecting users searching for "Tor浏览器" (i.e., Tor Browser in Ch...

The maintainers of the Tails project have issued a warning that the Tor Browser that's bundled with the operating system is unsafe to use for accessing or entering sensitive information. "We recommend that you stop using Tails until the release of 5.1 (May 31) if you use Tor Browser for sensitive information (passwords, private messages, personal information, etc.)," the project  said  in an advisory issued this week. Tails, short for The Amnesic Incognito Live System, is a security-oriented Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at preserving privacy and anonymity by connecting to the internet through the Tor network. The alert comes as Mozilla on May 20, 2022 rolled out fixes for  two critical zero-day flaws  in its Firefox browser, a modified version of which acts as the foundation of the Tor Browser. Tracked as CVE-2022-1802 and CVE-2022-1529, the two vulnerabilities are what's referred to as  prototype pollution  that could be weaponized to gain J...

Russia has stepped up its censorship efforts in the country by fully blocking access to the Tor web anonymity service, coinciding with the  ban  of six virtual private network (VPN) operators, as the government continues its efforts to control the internet and crack down on attempts to circumvent locally imposed web restrictions. The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, also known as Roskomnadzor, the watchdog responsible for monitoring, controlling and censoring Russian mass media, announced the block, accusing it of enabling access to illegal content, Reuters  reported  this week. Russia  accounts  for 15% of all Tor users, with more than 310,000 daily users, second only to the U.S. Tor, short for The Onion Router,  enables  users to automatically encrypt and reroute their web requests through a network of Tor relays for anonymizing network traffic, as well as help bypass censorship and p...

A new analysis of website fingerprinting (WF) attacks aimed at the Tor web browser has revealed that it's possible for an adversary to glean a website frequented by a victim, but only in scenarios where the threat actor is interested in a specific subset of the websites visited by users. "While attacks can exceed 95% accuracy when monitoring a small set of five popular websites, indiscriminate (non-targeted) attacks against sets of 25 and 100 websites fail to exceed an accuracy of 80% and 60%, respectively," researchers Giovanni Cherubin, Rob Jansen, and Carmela Troncoso  said  in a newly published paper. Tor browser  offers  "unlinkable communication" to its users by routing internet traffic through an overlay network, consisting of more than six thousand relays, with the goal of anonymizing the originating location and usage from third parties conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. It achieves this by building a circuit that traverses via an ...

Open-source Tor browser has been updated to version 10.0.18 with fixes for multiple issues, including a privacy-defeating bug that could be used to uniquely fingerprint users across different browsers based on the apps installed on a computer. In addition to  updating  Tor to 0.4.5.9, the browser's Android version has been upgraded to Firefox to version 89.1.1, alongside incorporating patches rolled out by Mozilla for several  security vulnerabilities  addressed in Firefox 89. Chief among the rectified issues is a new fingerprinting attack that came to light last month. Dubbed  scheme flooding , the vulnerability enables a malicious website to leverage information about installed apps on the system to assign users a permanent unique identifier even when they switch browsers, use incognito mode, or a VPN. Put differently, the  weakness  takes advantage of custom URL schemes in apps as an attack vector, allowing a bad actor to track a device's user ...

Okay, folks, it's time to update your Firefox web browser once again—yes, for the second time this week. After patching a critical actively-exploited vulnerability in Firefox 67.0.3 earlier this week, Mozilla is now warning millions of its users about a second zero-day vulnerability that attackers have been found exploiting in the wild. The newly patched issue ( CVE-2019-11708 ) is a "sandbox escape" vulnerability, which if chained together with the previously patched "type confusion" bug ( CVE-2019-11707 ), allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on victims' computers just by convincing them into visiting a malicious website. Browser sandboxing is a security mechanism that keeps third-party processes isolated and confined to the browser, preventing them from damaging other sensitive parts of a computer's operating system. "Insufficient vetting of parameters passed with the Prompt:Open IPC message between child and parent proc...

Important Update (21 June 2019) ➤  The Tor Project on Friday released second update ( Tor Browser 8.5.3 ) for its privacy web-browser that patches the another Firefox zero-day vulnerability patched this week. Following the latest critical update for Firefox, the Tor Project today released an updated version of its anonymity and privacy browser to patch the same Firefox vulnerability in its bundle. Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox 67.0.3 and Firefox ESR 60.7.1 versions to patch a critical actively-exploited vulnerability ( CVE-2019-11707 ) that could allow attackers to remotely take full control over systems running the vulnerable browser versions. Besides updating Firefox, the latest Tor Browser 8.5.2 for desktops also includes updated NoScript version 10.6.3 that fixes a few known issues. According to the Tor Project Team, if you are already using Tor browser with "safer" and "safest" security levels, the flaw doesn't affect you. For som...

Wohooo! Great news for privacy-focused users. Tor Browser, the most popular privacy-focused browser, for Android is finally out of beta, and the first stable version has now arrived on Google Play Store for anyone to download. The Tor Project announced Tuesday the first official stable release of its ultra-secure internet browser for Android devices, Tor Browser 8.5 —which you can now download for FREE on your mobile devices from Google Play Store. Tor Browser is mostly used by privacy-focused people, activists, journalists, and even cyber criminal gangs to avoid government monitoring. It allows users to browse the Internet anonymously, by hiding their IP addresses and identity, through a network of encrypted servers that bounce their web requests around multiple intermediate links. Access to Tor anonymity network was previously available on Android mobile operating system only through other apps or browsers like Orbot / Orfox app, but you can now use the official Tor Brow...

Zerodium, the infamous exploit vendor that earlier this year offered $1 million for submitting a zero-day exploit for Tor Browser , today publicly revealed a critical zero-day flaw in the anonymous browsing software that could reveal your identity to the sites you visit. In a Tweet, Zerodium shared a zero-day vulnerability that resides in the NoScript browser plugin comes pre-installed with the Mozilla Firefox bundled in the Tor software. NoScript is a free browser extension that blocks malicious JavaScript, Java, Flash and other potentially dangerous content on all web pages by default, though users can whitelist sites they trust. According to Zerodium, NoScript "Classic" versions 5.0.4 to 5.1.8.6--with 'Safest' security level enabled--included in Tor Browser 7.5.6 can be bypassed to run any JavaScript file by changing its content-type header to JSON format. In other words, a website can exploit this vulnerability to execute malicious JavaScript on victim...

If you can't find it on Google, you will definitely find it on the Dark Web . Black markets on the Dark web are not known for just buying drugs, it is a massive hidden network where you can buy pretty much anything you can imagine—from pornography, weapon, and counterfeit currencies, to hacking tools, exploits, malware, and zero-days. One such type of underground marketplace on Dark Web is RDP Shop, a platform from where anyone can buy RDP access (remote desktop protocol) to thousands of hacked machines for a small fee. While investigating several underground RDP shops, security researchers from the McAfee's Advanced Threat Research team discovered that someone is selling remote access linked to security systems at a major International airport for as low as $10. Yes, that's $10, I didn't miss any zeros. Instead of buying RDP credential, researchers used the Shodan search engine to find the correct IP address of the hacked Windows Server machine, whose ad...

If you follow us on Twitter , you must be aware that since yesterday we have been warning Mac and Linux users of the Tor anonymity browser about a critical vulnerability that could leak their real IP addresses to potential attackers when they visit certain types of web pages. Discovered by Italian security researcher Filippo Cavallarin, the vulnerability resides in FireFox that eventually also affects Tor Browser, since the privacy-aware service that allows users to surf the web anonymously uses FireFox at its core. Dubbed by the researcher as TorMoil , the vulnerability affects Tor browser for macOS and Linux and not for Windows, but keeping in mind the security and privacy of Tor users, details about this flaw has not been yet publicly revealed. Cavallarin, CEO of the security firm We Are Segment, privately reported the security vulnerability to Tor developers on Thursday (October 26), and the Tor developers have rolled out an emergency update Tor version 7.0.8 . According...

The Tor Project has made some significant changes to its infrastructure by improving the way the 'onion' network protects its users' privacy and security. Since the beginning, the largest free online anonymity network has been helping users browse the web anonymously, and its onion service provides a network within which encrypted websites can be run anonymously. However, the infrastructure design and encryption behind the service has become little outdated, eventually leaving it vulnerable to potential and resourceful attackers. Tor network has become such a potential target that even Zerodium, a company that acquires and resells zero-day exploits, is ready to pay $1 million for Tor zero-day exploits . Keeping these concerns in mind, the Tor Project has been working to upgrade its infrastructure over the past four years, and the good news is… A few weeks ago, the Tor Project announced the release of Tor 0.3.2.1-alpha that includes support for the next generati...

Do you know? Thousands of websites use HTML5 Canvas —a method supported by all major browsers that allow websites to dynamically draw graphics on web pages—to track and potentially identify users across the websites by secretly fingerprinting their web browsers. Over three years ago, the concern surrounding browser fingerprinting was highlighted by computer security experts from Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium. In 2014, the researchers demonstrated how browser's native Canvas element can be used to draw unique images to assign each user's device a number (a fingerprint) that uniquely identifies them. These fingerprints are then used to detect when that specific user visits affiliated websites and create a profile of the user's web browsing habits, which is then shared among advertising partners for targeted advertisements. Since then many third-party plugins and add-ons (ex. Canvas Defender ) emerged online to help users identify and block ...

It seems like Tor Browser zero-day exploits are in high demand right now—so much so that someone is ready to pay ONE MILLION dollars. Zerodium—a company that specialises in acquiring and reselling zero-day exploits—just announced that it will pay up to USD 1,000,000 for working zero-day exploits for the popular Tor Browser on Tails Linux and Windows operating system. Tor browser users should take this news an early warning, especially who use Tails OS to protect their privacy. Zero-day exploit acquisition platform has also published some rules and payout details on its website, announcing that the payout for Tor exploits with no JavaScript has been kept double than those with JavaScript enabled. The company has also clearly mentioned that the exploit must leverage remote code execution vulnerability, the initial attack vector should be a web page and it should work against the latest version of Tor Browser. Moreover, the zero-day Tor exploit must work without requiring an...

With the growing number of cyber attacks and breaches, a significant number of companies and organisations have started Bug Bounty programs for encouraging hackers, bug hunters and researchers to find and responsibly report bugs in their services and get rewarded. Following major companies and organisations, the non-profit group behind Tor Project – the largest online anonymity network that allows people to hide their real identity online – has finally launched a " Bug Bounty Program ." The Tor Project announced on Thursday that it joined hands with HackerOne to start a public bug bounty program to encourage hackers and security researchers to find and privately report vulnerabilities that could compromise the anonymity network. HackerOne is a bug bounty startup that operates bug bounty programs for companies including Yahoo, Twitter, Slack, Dropbox, Uber, General Motors – and even the United States Department of Defense for Hack the Pentagon initiative. Bug bo...

Dark Web is right now going through a very rough time. Just two days ago, a hacker group affiliated with Anonymous broke into the servers of Freedom Hosting II and took down more than 10,000 Tor-based .onion dark websites with an alarming announcement to its visitors, which said: " Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked. " Freedom Hosting II is the single largest host of underground websites accessible only through Tor anonymising browser that hosts somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all sites on the Dark Web, anonymity and privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis estimated . Besides defacing all Dark Web sites hosted on Freedom Hosting II with the same message and stealing its database, the hackers also demanded a ransom for 0.1 Bitcoin (just over $100) to return the compromised data to the hosting service. Now, it has been reported that the stolen database from Freedom Hosting II has publicly been released online to a site hosted on the Tor network, wh...

The non-profit organization behind TOR – the largest online anonymity network that allows people to hide their real identity online – has launched an early alpha version of Sandboxed Tor Browser 0.0.2 . Yes, the Tor Project is working on a sandboxed version of the Tor Browser that would isolate the Tor Browser from other processes of the operating system and limit its ability to interact or query low-level APIs that can lead to the exposure of real IP addresses, MAC addresses, computer name, and more. Sandboxing is a security mechanism for separating running programs. When an application is sandboxed, its process runs in a separate environment from the underlying operating system, so that errors or security issues in that application can not be leveraged to affect other parts of the OS. Sandbox applications are enabled in their own sequestered area and memory, where they can be worked on without posing any threat to other applications or the operating system. Major moder...

Hackers are actively exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Firefox to unmask Tor Browser users, similar to what the FBI exploited during an investigation of a child pornography site. Tor (The Onion Router) is an anonymity software that not only provides a safe heaven to human rights activists, journalists, government officials, but also is a place where drugs, assassins for hire, child pornography, and other illegal activities has allegedly been traded. A Javascript zero-day exploit currently being actively exploited in the wild is designed to remotely execute malicious code on the Windows operating system via memory corruption flaw in Firefox web browser. The exploit code was publicly published by an admin of the SIGAINT privacy-oriented public email service on the Tor-Talk mailing list. The mailing list message reveals that the zero-day exploit affecting Firefox is currently being exploited against Tor Browser users by unknown attackers to leak the potentially identifyi...

A critical vulnerability resides in the fully-patched version of the Mozilla's Firefox browser that could allow well-resourced attackers to launch man-in-the-middle (MITM) impersonation attacks and also affects the Tor anonymity network. The Tor Project patched the issue in the browser's HTTPS certificate pinning system on Friday with the release of its Tor Browser version 6.0.5 , while Mozilla still has to patch the critical flaw in Firefox. Attackers can deliver Fake Tor and Firefox Add-on Updates The vulnerability could allow a man-in-the-middle attacker who is able to obtain a forged certificate for addons.mozilla.org to impersonate Mozilla servers and as a result, deliver a malicious update for NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere or other Firefox extensions installed on a targeted computer. "This could lead to arbitrary code execution [vulnerability]," Tor officials warned in an advisory. "Moreover, other built-in certificate pinnings are affected as wel...