Tor

EFF recently kicked off its second Tor Challenge, an initiative to strengthen the Tor network for online anonymity and improve one of the best free privacy tools in existence. The campaign—which launched with partners at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Tor Project, and the Free Software Foundation—is already off to a great start. In just the first few days, it's seen over 600 new or expanded Tor nodes—more than during the entire first Tor Challenge.

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.  

The Silk Road, for all its clever uses of security protections like Tor and Bitcoin to protect the site’s lucrative drug trade, still offered its enemies a single point of failure. When the FBI seized the server that hosted the market in October and arrested its alleged owner Ross Ulbricht, the billion-dollar drug bazaar came crashing down.

If one group of Bitcoin black market enthusiasts has their way, the next online free-trade zone could be a much more elusive target.

Do you use the free email client Thunderbird? Do you also use Tor? If so, then there's been a security flaw awaiting a fix from Mozilla for over two years; now the bug has been publicly disclosed.Thunderbird security bug Mike Cardwell, a developer, IT consultant, sysadmin and security researcher in the UK, informed the Tor-talk mailing list about a security issue in the Thunderbird app.

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.

A Harvard student was charged Tuesday with making a hoax bomb threat just so he could get out of a final exam.

Eldo Kim, 20, of Cambridge, Mass., was scheduled for a hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court. He could face as long as five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine if convicted of communicating the bomb threat that cleared four large buildings Monday.

It only took a month for the Silk Road 2.0 to go live after the now infamous Silk Road marketplace shuttered. One month. Should the budding deep-web bazaar experience the same fate as its predecessor, and be knocked out by authorities still whack-a-moling their way through the online front of the war on drugs, the Silk Road 3.0 would be up and running in 15 minutes, tops.

The U.S. National Security Agency has repeatedly tried to compromise Tor, the government-funded online anonymity tool, but has had little success, according to a new report in the U.K.'s Guardian.

We've had several requests by the press and others to talk about the Silk Road situation today. We only know what's going on by reading the same news sources everyone else is reading.

The migration of the 'Mevade' botnet to use the Tor anonymity network was most likely a botched attempt to hide that has ended up having the opposite effect, security firm Damballa has speculated.

News that something was afoot came after a huge spike on Tor from 19 August onwards, which caused a doubling of traffic on a single day to just over one million connections per day. Three weeks later and Tor’s daily connections have hit 4 million per day, with no end to the rise in sight.