Tor

For a tool that’s meant to serve as a cloak of online anonymity, Tor is surprisingly transparent. The non-profit Tor project whose software powers its network of thousands of volunteer proxy computers also publishes a frequently updated collection of data about the location and bandwidth of those privacy-enhancing machines on desks and in datacenters around the world. Now a data visualization company has assembled that data into an interactive graphic, beautifully capturing the Tor network’s complexity and scale.

Tor -- The Onion Router -- is used as a way of browsing the web (more) anonymously. Most well-known for providing access to what has become known as the Dark Web, Tor has faced competition from other secure browsing systems such as HORNET. But now it is set to benefit from key changes that will improve security and have further implications.

Journalists and citizens living under repressive regimes alike depend on the encrypted Tor browser to surf the web anonymously. But in certain cases, an attacker can figure out which dark web site a user is trying to access by passively monitoring Tor traffic, and even reveal the identity of servers hosting sites on the Tor network.

The Tor Project has pulled the plug on its cloud service, citing a lack of interest in fixing bugs in the platform.

The Tor Cloud was devised by the not-for profit developer of privacy and censorship circumvention tools in 2011. It was envisioned as an easy way to deploy bridges in the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure, to allow users to bypass internet censorship.

The project was a partnership between the Tor Project and consultancy Expression Tech, which aimed to assist media organisations working in repressive or post-conflict societies.

TOR has had a major upgrade to stable version 4.5 of its dedicated browser.

Tor, which is a redundant abbreviation for The Onion Router, allows users to stay anonymous online and make visits that cannot be traced back to the individual through a series of relays which encrypt the credentials over and over again.

A new version of the popular Tor software that enables anonymous communication between computers around the world was released today, April 7, in order to fix two security issues discovered in the previous versions.

Tor 0.2.6.7 is a very important update, as it fixes two security issues that could be used by an attacker to either crash hidden services or clients visiting the respective hidden services.

Last week’s takedown of Silk Road 2.0 wasn’t the only law enforcement strike on "darknet" illicit websites being concealed by the Tor Project’s network of anonymizing routers. A total of 410 .onion pages on at least 27 different sites, some of which sell everything from drugs to murder-for-hire assassins, were shut down as part of Operation Onymous—a joint operation between16 member nations of Europol, the FBI, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Josh Pitts of Leviathan Security Group has uncovered a malicious Tor exit node in Russia. The node wraps Windows executable files inside a second, malicious Windows executable. The wrapping is only attempted on uncompressed Windows PE (Portable Executable) files.

The Tor anonymous encryption service offers internet users a way to surf the web with anonymity and prides itself on the level of security it offers. Well it looks as though the network was compromised earlier this year along with some user data, according to a recent Tor developer blog post. It also said that those who used Tor between early February and July 4th of this year "should assume" they have been in some way affected by the attack.

A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month.

The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference’s website.