Tor security compromised by NSA, according to Microsoft

Andy Malone, head of Microsoft's Enterprise Security, claims that the TOR (The Onion Router) network does not provide the anonymity that its many users think it does.

Speaking at Microsoft's TechEd North America event earlier this week, the founder of the Cyber Crime Security Forum said that hackers and government agencies can now compromise the security of the TOR network.  

First set up in September 2002, TOR was originally conceived as means for Internet users from those countries with oppressive regimes to side step any state monitoring and similar controls on the web.  The software-enabled service, which relies on benevolent providers of Internet switching around the world, ostensibly provides high degrees of anonymity by re-routing IP streams and stripping other identifiers from the TCP/IP data transmissions.