Privacy

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Is TOR compromised? (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

69 comments fedilink hide all child comments

All the recent dark net arrests seem to be pretty vague on how the big bad was caught (except the IM admin's silly opsec errors) In the article they say he clicked on a honeypot link, but how was his ip or any other identifier identified, why didnt tor protect him.

Obviously this guy in question was a pedophile and an active danger, but recently in my country a state passed a law that can get you arrested if you post anything the government doesnt like, so these tools are important and need to be bulletproof.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 2 months ago (1 children)

He most likely had bad OPSEC.

Secondly, he took this imagery he had created and then "turned to AI chatbots to ensure these minor victims would be depicted as if they had engaged in the type of sexual contact he wanted to see." In other words, he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.

This probably didn’t help much either.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The government is cagey about how, exactly, this criminal activity was unearthed, noting only that Herrera "tried to access a link containing apparent CSAM." Presumably, this "apparent" CSAM was a government honeypot file or web-based redirect that logged the IP address and any other relevant information of anyone who clicked on it.

It looks like a combination of bad opsec and clicking on a download link.

I know there has been some back and forth whether it's good to use a VPN with tor and feel like this is just going to open up that conversation again.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I’ve been looking into this myself recently and it’s definitely an interesting conversation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It might depend on the VPN provider. If it's someone like Google, no way.

But Mullivad that has a proven track record of not keeping logs, that might be worth it.

I've also heard tor over i2p but don't know enough about the latter to have an opinion

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think the other aspect is that you could be adding more things to make you stand out amongst other tor users.

there’s a more technical term for all this but I can’t recall what it is

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Differentiators? The idea behind the tor browser specifically is to make it harder to fingerprint you by giving trackers the exact same information for each browser session across all its users, making it harder to differentiate between one user and another.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

This is what I wars thinking of, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Bad opsec and illusion of anonymity will likely render all the extra steps null, most likely. Case in point, we've been reminding people not to torrent through Tor for years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Torrenting through Tor sounds like a recipe for disaster.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

LEOs using what amount to phishing attacks to grab folks looking for CSAM has a long and storied history behind it.