Russian Spy Nodes Caught Snooping on Facebook Users
Somewhere in Russia an eavesdropper is operating a network of wiretapped nodes at the edge of the Tor anonymity network. And he’s particularly interested in what you’re doing on Facebook.
That’s the conclusion of two researchers who used custom software to test Tor exit nodes for sneaky behavior, in a four-month study published yesterday.
Philipp Winter and Stefan Lindskog of Karlstad University in Sweden identified 25 nodes that tampered with web traffic, stripped out encryption, or censored sites. Some of the faulty nodes likely resulted from configuration mistakes or ISP issues. But 19 of the nodes were caught using the same bogus crypto certificate to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on users, decrypting and re-encrypting traffic on the fly.
