Traffic Studies Reveal Complex Picture of Tor's Role on 'Dark Web'
For a week in March, Website security firm CloudFlare analyzed the traffic hitting its customers' sites from the anonymous Tor Network.
The results of the study illustrate the double-edged nature of online anonymity. The Tor Network—a peer-to-peer collection of volunteered servers linked together to create an anonymizing Web service—allows people in oppressive countries to surf the Internet, enables activists to communicate freely and helps journalists evade government surveillance.
Yet, it also allows criminals to act with little fear of repercussions, because circumventing the anonymity provided by Tor is difficult, albeit not impossible. In this case, the company found that nearly 94 percent of requests to CloudFlare customers' Web sites coming from the Tor network were automated and malicious—with comment spam, vulnerability scanning, advertising click-fraud, content scraping and brute-force login attempts topping the list of attacks coming from the network.
